and, and how it's maintained and and that there's we're talking a lot about law, and
we can, and we've been talking about formal statutes
and constitutions, and, but political scientists also talk about laws.
Economists talk about laws, which are merely
empirical regularities that are useful in making predictions.
The law of supply and demand.
Well that's not you know a law exactly like the Sherman
Antitrust Law or the Smoot Hawley Tariff or the Voting Rights Act.
It's,
it's an empirical regularity that when price goes up, you know
fewer people demand stuff in general and more people supply it.
And so the law supply and demand are,
are certain empirical regularities that we tend to observe.
Political scientists have observed political regularities.
One of the more important regularities
recognized by political scientist, is a law
called Duverger's laws. Named for a political science, scientist
Maurice Duverjay, and and it basically says it's a prediction about how
many parties in any given system we are likely to see in long-term equilibrium.
And the long-term can be quite long but, but one version
of Duverger's law says the following: That if you have n number
of seats simultaneously up for grabs, you can in long-term equilibrium probably
have no more than n plus 1 viable parties. It's a musical chairs game.
There's one less chair than there are number of
people sort of playing to, to sit in that chair.
So if you have three seats simultaneously up for grabs, you could
have four parties all vying for the three seats and, maybe two
parties that are going to get pretty, pretty clearly
going to get a seat and, and, that third seat
is going to be fought over by the, the,
the two lesser parties or something like that, so.
This means if you have one seat up for grabs,
in long-term equilibrium you're going to have two parties vying for it.
Each party, in effect, trying to capture that middle voter the, the,
the median voter, the person in the center of the political spectrum.
So when you have one governor up for grabs,
you're going to have two, gubernatorial parties in long term equilibrium.
If you have one senator who's voted on at any given point
in time, and we almost never have two senators simultaneously up for election.
We might in some special election if there's been a
death or resignation, but ordinarily the senate races are staggered.
So that in any given year, either no senator is up for election or only
one at a time.
because the other one is elected on a different schedule so one senator
at a time, one governor at a time, one president at a time.
And because of a statute passed in the 1840s, congressional districts are single
member districts, if Pennsylvania has you know 14 representatives