🧵 47 years after its publication, McKelvey’s chaos theorem is having it’s day in the House Republican Conference.

The chaos social choice theory states that majority rule decisions in a two-dimensional space are unstable. Any point in the space can be reached
1/n through a sequence of majority votes. There are infinite outcomes in equilibria; no Condorcet winner.

This chaos is not usually observed because legislative institutions—like party leadership, committees, and agenda setting—constrain the available choice sets and
2/n

There is not great evidence that most of the things people tend to think drive election outcomes, actually do in most cases (e.g., gaffes, campaign ads, policy positions). Some of the weak affect is due to turnout being predicable and low. But when an election outcome is… 🧵 …unexpected and strongly decisive it can affect people’s *perceptions* of what drove the election, and that can affect behaviors of future voters and candidates.

Early reports suggest many Kansas voters were motivated by abortion politics, in the direction of a backlash