This is opinion. So read it as such. But consider it please.
Obviously if you read this based on the title. I assume you oppose the Tories.
But if you are wondering why labour are so keen to manage expectations. There is a reason.
Campaign funding wise the Tories are estimated to be 19m ahead of labour. But honestly at the moment they are not spending a huge amount more.
We know the Tories are skilled at election manipulation. So there is genuine fear that the Tories plan to launch a campaign within the last few days.
I.E. when there is less time and funding to ensure fact checking is effective.
They know Starmer is more publicity aware then Corbyn was. He is able to play it in a way that dose not scare traditional Conservative voters.
They also know thanks to Boris, that the courts are unable to punish them for outright lies during any political campaign. And that Rishi is prepared to lie about and accuse civil servants of lying when challenged.
As huge as polling is against the Tories. All it would take is some dramatic claim against the party or Starmer. To convince Tory traditional voters to bite their tongue and vote Tory. While convincing left wing voters not to vote or to switch to 3rd party in seats where labour are the 1st or 2nd party.
The fact we know they have a huge amount of money unspent. Makes it clear they plan to launch something nearer the end of the election. And the only advantage of leaving it so late. Is it will limit the ability of the party to effectively react. Or fact checkers to be able to prove and distribute evidence of lies.
Please be prepared for this.
what is the rate at which consolidation if parties occurs? if a fptp system exists with more than two parties, what reason do we have to believe it will consolidate, and when?
I don't know, though I would be interested to read. Taagepera and Grofman's 1985 work examined the elections of western Europe, the Anglosphere, and a couple of others across 1945-1980. They found that of the seven single-winner sytems, only France had a reliable third party (and of course, France does not use regular FPTP), and of the 15 multi-winner systems only Austria and Ireland did not have at least three. That is, of course, only correlation, and the authors have some other interesting points about major political issues within a country, but they do come down in favour of Duverger's approach.
Some of the papers I've read on it have mentioned that particularly young democracies (such as Nigeria after re-establishing democracy in the late 90s, and I think the paper using that example was from the 2010s) do not appear to have settled into this pattern. On the other hand, in an older system like the UK, we see examples like the 1922 general election. The Liberals performed very badly in the prior election, Labour outperformed them in 1922, and the Liberals have never risen above third place since.
If Duverger's law is completely off base, why do you think that the UK has such a strong two party donination? No party outside the top two has won a general election for a century, and prior to that it was the same story with one of the top two swapped out.
I didn't say he's off base. I said it's useless. he's not actually making a claim that I can use to predict anything.
Yes, he is. It's that you can usually expect FPTP elections to produce a winner from one of the two dominant parties. Since your vote does not count for anything if your candidate didn't win in UK elections, you can use this information to instead pick your favourite of the two candidates that are likely to win and maximise your chances of seeing your preferred of the two win, as opposed to voting third party and achieving nothing. You don't need to know how quickly a two party system entrenches itself for this to be useful. You just need to know if it already has and which parties are the dominant ones in your constituency.