Talk:Center squeeze

Systems which can do either well or poorly in a center squeeze situation include most graded Bucklin systems and score voting.

Under what circumstances do they not do well? — Psephomancy (talk) 03:44, 6 February 2019 (UTC)

I think center squeeze is an interesting criterion & it's valuable to compare systems which exhibit it vs don't exhibit it. Some questions:

• Is there an existing criterion that is a superset of exhibiting/preventing center squeeze? What I mean is, is there a criterion that if met by a voting system, center squeeze can never happen?
• If not, is "exhibits center squeeze" worthy of a criterion?
• Lastly, whether or not it's called out as a criterion, what voting systems do & don't exhibit it?

--Marcosb (talk) 19:52, 20 July 2021 (UTC)

"Liberal" and "Conservative"

In section Center_squeeze#Effect_of_strategy, I would suggest not using real party/ideology names like "Liberal" or "Conservative", as this will often be misunderstood as advocating in favor of a "Centrist" or moderate winner. (FairVote conflates these concepts on https://fairvote.org/why-the-condorcet-criterion-is-less-important-than-it-seems/ when they say "Condorcet winners are centrist by nature, regardless of the preferences of the electorate" and "choosing the centrist candidate every time is just falling into the fallacy of the middle ground".)

Center-squeeze is bad because it elects poor representatives, not because it elects non-centrists on some absolute spectrum. If the voters are all pro-women's suffrage extremists and anti-prohibition extremists, then a good voting system that doesn't suffer from "center-squeeze" would elect a pro-suffrage and anti-prohibition candidate, not someone who is centrist on both issues. It's an unfortunate name, we should try not to reinforce this misconception. — Psephomancy (talk) 02:43, 14 May 2023 (UTC)