A party that a majority agrees with on every separate issue can lose the election, because voters choose bundles rather than issues.
Daudt and Rae named it in 1976, after Ostrogorski's study of party organisation. With three issues and three blocs of voters, each bloc agreeing with one party on two issues but caring most about the third, the other party can win while being in the minority on every question taken alone. Bundling policies into parties is what opens the gap between issue majorities and electoral majorities.
In practice
- A referendum on each clause of a treaty passes, and a referendum on the treaty as a whole fails.
- A committee approves every line of the budget and then rejects the budget.
- Standing
- A structural feature of bundled choice, demonstrated rather than measured. Compare the Condorcet paradox and Arrow's impossibility theorem.
- Subject
- Law & Politics
- Essay
- The paradoxes of democracy and the quips of partisans