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Why Green Party candidates face an uphill battle

Parties like the Greens aren’t supposed to do well in countries like Canada, which has a first-past-the-post electoral system where a candidate only needs to receive more votes than any other to win their seat.

Many political scientists think countries with plurality systems can’t sustain more than two viable political parties. This idea is often described as Duverger’s law, after the French sociologist who first investigated the links between plurality voting systems and political party number in the mid-20th century.

The empirical credibility of Duverger’s law is up for debate. Canada has never conformed well to its predictions. For instance, many federal ridings are contested as three-way races between Conservatives, Liberals and New Democrats.

But political scientists are right to highlight the challenges that small parties face in plurality systems. Voters may support the party, but if they don’t think it can win, they’ll vote for a second-choice party that can. This is the much-discussed problem of strategic voting.

As a result, Green Party candidates have a doubly difficult task. Like other candidates, they must persuade voters that their party will best serve Canadians. But unlike other candidates, they also have to persuade voters that enough other Canadians share this same set of preferences.

In political science, we call this a problem of “second-order beliefs.” First-order beliefs are the things individuals think. Second-order beliefs are the beliefs we hold about other people’s beliefs.