[EM] electoral methods - US and Europe

[James Green-Armytage]

"Toplak Jurij" <jure.toplak at uni-mb.si> writes:
>Yes, the in US the methods are used for allocation of 435 seats to 50
>states
>and in Europe they are used for allocation of seats to the parties.
>However,
>mathematically, problem is the same.
>With "ideal proportionality" I mean that party (or state in a case of US)
>would get exactly the same percentage of seats as it received votes (or
>people in a case of US). Most of the PR methods are supposed to try to
>come
>as close as possible, but, of course, none of them can achieve it
>(because a
>party cannot be assigned 5.43 seats, for example :)
>
>Altough it is often thought that D'Hondt is superior to Saint-Lague, as
>you
>say, all the research shows that D'Hondt systematically and consisently
>favors large parties, while Saint-Lague does not favour either large or
>small ones. (see Lijphart 1985, Balinski & Young 2001). For this reason
>D'Hondt was also abandoned in US in 1832 (after 40 years of use),
>therefore
>46 years before D'Hondt "invented" it.

I reply:
	Do you realize the extent of the theoretical unsoundness of Saint-Lague
and Hare? I was convinced of it by an example which James Gilmour gave
last July. Here is a link to the posting which contains that example:
http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2003-July/010368.html
	I would say that Saint-Lague systematically favors smaller parties, and
while I'm all for smaller parties, I don't think that this is a good way
to go about giving them a bigger role, because it introduces a paradox of
more people gaining fewer representatives, along with an incentive for
parties to split themselves up into smaller chunks for purely strategic
reasons. I've read Lijphart and I think he was wrong about this.
	I think that the best way to help smaller parties in a proportional
representation scenario is to use an STV system so that there is no risk
of people "wasting" their votes on small parties with not quite enough
votes. Also in some cases the votes transferred from an eliminated small
party candidate may go towards helping another small party candidate to
win a seat.
	As for seat apportionment by state, I admit again that I'm not an expert
in it. You're saying that the U.S. now uses a Saint-Lague divisor? I live
in the U.S., and I didn't even know that.
>
James