Vector Politics

Political actions are taken with reference to a baseline. That baseline changes every time a political decision is made. The current status quo is, therefore, an appropriate point to use as the point of reference for comparing alternatives. From that point a policy can move the status quo towards a more distributed/centralized structure and/or more transformative/traditional purposes. The vertical axis I've termed the "real axis" because it represents the actual institutional structure. I've called the horizontal axis the "imaginary axis" because institutions often take on a purpose of their own, regardless of the intentions of legislators or officials who create and manage them. Their purpose may seem to be replaced by arbitrary and changeable decision-making processes depending on which party holds power.

There are clearly two main parties in politics, Democratic and Republican. The theory behind the Asplund Chart assumes that both major parties generally support policies that further centralize political institutions while disagreeing about the purposes these institutions should be put to. The Libertarian Party has been the most consistent third party attraction because it attempts to advance the distributed policies neither party will support.

I've represented the two major parties with equal pull and mirrored directions, but I think the basic theory holds even if the parties aren't completely matched. The three party vectors can be represented as four power-weighted vectors for factions. Up represents libertarians; down moderates; left progressives; and right conservatives.

Over longer periods, the progressives and conservatives would mostly cancel each other out from a policy perspective. The weak libertarian influence provides almost no counter-balance to moderate compromises between the two major parties. The net effect of all these vectors is democracy's drift – a tendency towards increased institutional centralization that concentrates decision-making at the highest levels of government.

If the political history of a country were to be graphed, it would look something like the diagram below. Short term electoral victories for conservatives or progressives would move the political status quo left and right. The general tendency towards centralization would keep the status quo moving towards increasing institutional centralization.