Thank you.
This has been extremely insightful. We've had some good debate around new and existing ideas.
I don't take this opportunity very often, but I have one question for Dr. Maskin. It wasn't the principal point of your presentation—I understand that—but it's been working on my mind these last two hours.
You said that under the current system of first past the post, some people feel discouraged from running because they don't want to split the vote. I can see that readily in a U.S. primary system in the case of intra-party competition, in which someone says, “Look, I'm not going to run to become a presidential nominee because I don't want to split the vote and then the front-runner who's acceptable to me won't get in,” but I see that more as an issue of party power brokers applying pressure on a candidate who has a personal interest in being on the correct side of that party for long-term reasons. I can see it applying when the operating principle is sort of Sam Rayburn's famous saying, “If you want to get along, go along ”, but when it comes to people in a riding deciding whether they want to run for a party or not, my gut sense tells me their decision not to run is not because they don't want to upset their ideological cousin; most likely it's because they think they can't win. I've seen election campaigns, and this is counterintuitive, in which one candidate really goes hard after their ideological cousin.
Is there empirical evidence around this idea that first past the post causes people to think twice about running because they don't want to split the vote?