Understanding convictions, your own included

Perfectly consistent voters can produce a majority that is not. This two-century-old result still sheds light on the way collective decisions are made.

Almost everyone wants less poverty, more safety and breathable air. Political disagreement rarely begins with the destination: it begins with the route, and learning to spot that changes the nature of the discussion.

The most famous cleavage in political life was born from a detail of seating in an assembly. Two centuries later, it still informs, but much less than one thinks.

We picture political disagreement as a single frontier. It looks rather like several superimposed lines, which never quite coincide.

Not voting is not a single position. It is one and the same act covering very different situations, and conflating them leads to false conclusions.

The most violent exchanges do not always set the most distant positions against each other. Often it is the reverse, and the mechanism is perfectly understandable.

A poll is a measuring instrument with a known precision and known blind spots. The problem rarely comes from the instrument, often from how it is read.

The centre denotes at least three different things depending on context. That is what explains how it can be declared both a majority and nowhere to be found.

A constitution is not a neutral text organising debate from outside. Each mechanism it installs decides between values that conflict.

Part of political disagreement does not set two positions against each other, but two definitions of the same term. These are the longest, because they appear to bear on substance.

The feeling that proposals converge while voters diverge is frequent. Several documented mechanisms explain it, without any need to suppose a collusion.

A ballot does not say why it was cast. Three different logics produce the same act, and the electoral system largely determines which dominates.