Exercise 2: Why Perot 1992 Is the Cleaner Demonstration — Possible Solution ================================================================================================================== Both results genuinely illustrate Duverger's Law, but they aren't equally clean examples, and the reason comes down to a real confound present in the 1912 case that the 1992 case doesn't share. THE 1912 RESULT, AND WHY IT'S MESSIER Theodore Roosevelt won 27.4% of the popular vote and 88 real electoral votes in 1912 - the best third-party performance in US history. But that result came with a major real complication: Roosevelt wasn't simply a third-party candidate competing against two healthy major parties. He had split off from the sitting Republican Party itself, and his run directly caused the sitting Republican incumbent, Taft, to collapse to 23.17% of the vote and only 8 electoral votes - the worst performance by an incumbent president in the country's history. In other words, Roosevelt's 88 electoral votes came largely from states where the usual Republican coalition had been split in half by his own candidacy, not from Roosevelt building a genuinely new, durable, nationwide coalition from scratch the way the article's own two-party system usually requires. The "third party" label understates how much this was really a fractured major party rather than a clean third force. THE 1992 RESULT, AND WHY IT'S CLEANER Ross Perot's 1992 run has no equivalent complication. He ran as a genuine independent, not as a breakaway faction of either major party, and both major-party candidates - Bill Clinton (43.0%) and George H.W. Bush (37.5%) - remained fully intact, competitive campaigns throughout. Perot's 18.9% of the popular vote is therefore a much purer measurement of how much real, standalone support a genuine outsider candidate could attract on his own merits. And despite that real, substantial national support - nearly one in five voters - he carried not a single state, and Chapter 6's own winner-take-all rule therefore gave him exactly zero electoral votes. WHY THIS MAKES PEROT THE CLEANER MECHANICAL-EFFECT EXAMPLE Duverger's mechanical effect specifically describes what happens to a party's vote share once it gets translated through a winner-take-all system - genuine national support simply not converting into any actual representation because it's spread too thin to win any single state outright. Perot's result shows that mechanism in its purest form: a large, real, standalone vote share producing precisely zero electoral seats. Roosevelt's result mixes that same mechanism together with a separate, unrelated event - an incumbent party's own internal collapse - making it harder to isolate what part of the outcome was really "third-party candidates get squeezed out" versus "one major party temporarily fell apart." ANSWER: Perot's 1992 result is the cleaner demonstration because he ran as a genuine independent against two fully intact major-party campaigns, so his 18.9% popular vote translating into zero electoral votes isolates Duverger's mechanical effect on its own. Roosevelt's 1912 result, while a larger raw vote share and real electoral votes won, is complicated by the fact that he had split off from an already- fracturing Republican Party and largely won his 88 electoral votes in states where the usual Republican coalition had collapsed around him - mixing the third-party effect together with a separate major-party breakdown, rather than showing the mechanism in isolation the way Perot's result does. WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER ------------------------------ It identifies the real confound in the 1912 case (Roosevelt's run was entangled with an incumbent party's own collapse) that the 1992 case doesn't share, explaining specifically why that makes Perot's result a purer test of the mechanical effect rather than just asserting one example is "better."