What the electoral-choice reports establish about viability, strategic voting, nomination filtering, representation, and the much weaker downstream claim about revolutionary sentiment.
The political-agency cluster strongly supports the claim that formal ballot access is not the same as a broad set of genuinely viable choices. It also supports strategic coordination around candidates perceived as capable of winning. The evidence is substantially weaker for the proposition that this compression independently causes rejection of democratic institutions or revolutionary preference.
Single-member plurality rules, strategic voting, spoiler concerns, candidate entry, party nomination processes, ballot-access rules, fundraising, and accumulated organizational advantages can compress a wider preference distribution into a smaller viable choice set. Several reports also distinguish losing a fair contest from believing a representative option never became viable.
Two major parties are not substantively interchangeable, and coalition bargaining can occur inside broad parties rather than between many parliamentary parties. Primaries create real intraparty competition. Negative voting can reflect meaningful perceived differences between outcomes, not merely “false choice.”
Representational mismatch and nonviable preferred alternatives plausibly reduce satisfaction and external efficacy, but the U.S.-specific causal evidence is thinner than the institutional evidence. The reports do not establish choice compression as a major independent cause of regime-replacement preferences or political violence.
“Neither party represents me,” “a third party is needed,” “I voted against the other side,” and “the political system needs major reform” are different attitudes. None should be silently recoded as revolutionary preference.
Panel or experimental evidence would need to show that perceived rule-induced exclusion changes support for replacing the political order after controlling for partisanship, ideology, economic conditions, identity threat, incumbent performance, political trust, and prior anti-system attitudes.
This brief synthesizes claims made in the supplied research corpus. It does not convert report conclusions into forecasts, endorsements, or operational guidance. Where the underlying reports disagree or rely on different definitions, the disagreement is preserved rather than silently resolved.