Either the center has shifted on the total spectrum, or this statement isn't backed by reality. At least in the US, both major parties are moving towards the right and moving towards authoritarian positions.
Presidential candidates' optimal strategy is to be centre of the party base in primaries, then centre of the entire country in the general election. (And they have to do this while avoiding accusations of flip flopping.)
(And there are other confounders that apply regardless of voting system. Nobody involved is working with perfect information and nobody is a perfectly rational actor.)
I guess this is what you meant by "non-rational actors" - people voting for policies they don't like because they like the person saying them.
Could get complex if people vote in the opposing party's primary though.
Not on social issues. Trump is a moderate on abortion and gay marriage. Bill Clinton passed DADT, DOMA, welfare work requirements, and his crime bill, and called for a crackdown on illegal immigration. He wouldn't be able to win the Democratic nomination nowadays.
> moving towards authoritarian positions
Unfortunately.
[0]: http://www.gallup.com/poll/170249/split-abortion-pro-choice-...
[1]: http://www.logcabin.org/pressrelease/a-message-on-the-gop-pl...
And while Trump might be less of an extremist on these issues than his fellow Republicans, the party's elected officials (including his running mate) haven't moved an inch towards the center on abortion rights. Mike Pence governed Indiana, a state with some of the tightest (and most ridiculous, honestly) restrictions on abortion in the country.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_positions_of_Donald_...
'Allowing the states to determine what is allowed' seems more moderate than 'no state may meaningfully restrict something,' no?
Both statements are true (shifts in the center, including long term trends in a single direction) happen, but are orthogonal to the idea that a two-party systems results in both parties driving for the middle seize the median voter (it would just make that a moving target.)
OTOH, all of the examples from experience show that two-party systems don't actually have that effect, and we have good ideas why:
1. Engagement falls off as a party's position gets further from a citizens, and
2. Political views are rarely unimodally distributed to start with, and two-party systems tend to promote more of a bimodal distribution on the main axis of variation.
So, a big part of what parties position for is keeping their base engaged, not appeal to the center.
Either the center has shifted on the total spectrum, or
this statement isn't backed by reality. At least in the US,
both major parties are moving towards the right and moving
towards authoritarian positions.
No, they don't. Heck, even many systems that do use FPTP (e.g., the UK) support more parties with representation in the main national legislative body than the US.
A two-party system isn't one where merely there are two stronger parties that tend to form governments or executive administrations.
Because that is the case in many countries, even countries which don't do FPTP, even countries which do things that people argue are good electorally, and that does not seem like a categorical improvement over what happens in, say, the US.
No, it's emphatically not, especially if you mean exclusively forms the government (not in a coalition.) And, if you don't mean that, it's pretty substantially weaker than the duopoly in the US.
Heck, even FPTP systems that aren't also Presidential systems (another structural factor that reduces competitive parties) generally don't do what you describe, at least in the form of exclusively non-coalition governments.
> and that does not seem like a categorical improvement over what happens in, say, the US.
Whether the difference is merely a substantial quantitative improvement with some creatively-defined common category or a categorical improvement is ultimately immaterial.
So a voting system with less of a strategy problem could make common knowledge of real voter preferences easier to arrive at -- the preferences people would honestly vote by, given the chance. You could still have just two major parties, but disciplined by a real option of serious competition if they don't address these no-longer-deniable preferences.
Caveats: 1. AFAIK we still need a clearer understanding of how much strategy people exercise in approval or score voting in practice, once they've gotten used to the new system. And 2. these are just my thoughts as a random citizen trying to see to a way to less large-scale insanity. I'm not a political scientist and I haven't seen one say anything like this about common knowledge and voting systems.
Your claim that authoritarianism is non-centrist is not obvious, I don't even agree it's true.
I made no such claim. My sentence has an "and" in it.