Hiatus

I'm off till March.I thank God that the US's democracyis on the rebound.dlwps, here's a blog-article that talks about lessons from studies of democratic transitions by a political scientist, Jay Ulfelder.  The last lesson is:9. The most likely outcome of a democratic transition nowadays is a competitive authoritarian regime, either because initial elections will be unfair by design or because the party that wins those elections will quickly use state resources to advantage itself in future contests. Highest confidence. Democracy is hard to produce and relatively easy to undo. Just ask the Iraqis, or the Nicaraguans, or theHungarians, or…
Methinks that the Tri-election Triagecould fix this tendency by making the system tend towards two major parties,neither of who are able to dominate.dlwpps,I got into an email exchange with the blog-author,I made my point that less-is-more PR solves a problem in "more local" elections,He wrote back, "I think your point about the power of successful examples is a good one. This is more like evolution than engineering, I think, so perhaps the effects that look negligible within a few years will become quite significant over the long run. -J"To which I replied, "This is probably why we need to review the trickle up effects of the use of cumulative voting for state reps elections in IL in IL and surrounding states both before and after it got removed in 1980.... That's as natural of an experiment as I can think of..."dlw