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doesn't "duverger's law" only exist in the US? I think there's credible evidence that just reforming the electoral college to a proportional vote system would reduce the "two party effect" in the US.
No, Duverger’s law refers to the tendency of places that use first-past-the-post voting to result in a 2-party system. This is not unique to the US. More info is in the above link, it's worth your time.
My understanding is that the electoral college distorts the voting power of individuals by giving empty states more voting power than they should have (electors are based on number of house and senate members), and also because those state elections are usually first-past the post winner-take-all, 51% wins all the electors, (except for Nebraska and Maine, which have multiple districts with multiple electors that can be split, but are still first-past-the-post.)
If you mean that replacing first-past-the-post winner-take-all elections with a different voting system that can yield proportional representation will lead to more viable candidates/parties, then that's exactly the same thing Duverger's law is saying. You can't have proportional representation with first-past-the-post elections.
The electoral college has hardly anything to do with the party system in the US because it's only used for presidential elections. If a third party was viable in FPTP then we should see a much larger share of them in Congress - especially the House - given the relatively small constituency of each representative and the large number of representatives.
Said parties literally choose the electors in the electoral college.
If a third party becomes viable and starts winning elections what typically happens is it will replace one of the other 2 parties, like when Whigs were replaced by Republicans.
I should have been more clear - I meant that since the electoral college is only used for presidential elections, its existence does not (meaningfully) affect the viability of a third party since the vast majority of elections are not decided by it. 100% agree with what you're saying.
In theory and over-simplified this would be true, in practice I think the way the electoral college has failed when 4+ candidates get into a tight election has lead to a lot of safeguards being created: The US political parties as institutions became more hostile to third parties and both the states and feds adopted laws more favorable to a two party system.
Canada, & UK for instance don't quite adhere to duverger's law as strongly and in fact most non-US countries that still have fptp elections seem to have more diverse party systems.
Thanks for elaborating. I agree, for a third party to successfully emerge in the US under our current system it would probably have the best odds if they started with local government.