Beyond Flatland: Machine Learning and the End of the Two-Party Binary

Summary

In democracies worldwide, billions of citizens hold an untold number of interests, opinions and positions. Political reality on the ground is vastly more complex than our political symbols and categories allow us to express. Our political choices are artificially constrained by existing abstractions that either compress us into just two large opposing parties, or in the case of proportional representation systems, a mix of smaller parties. Either way, the real complexity of people’s opinions is squashed. There are thousands of overlapping interest groups, not just two tribes. There are hundreds of thousands of issues and sub issues, not the small handful the media focus on during election cycles.