[EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PR favoring racial minorities

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

raphfrk at netscape.net wrote:
>   Jobst Heitzig said:
> 
>  > It is of no help for a minority to be represented proportionally when 
>  > still a mere 51% majority can make all decisions!
> 
> I disagree.  The advantage is that it allows 'on the fly' coalition 
> re-organisation.
> 
> If all the legislators are elected via a single seat system, then in 
> effect, the 2 coalitions must be decided prior to the election.  In
> fact, in the US, the Republican and Democrat 'coalitions' last on a
 > multi-decade scale.
> 
> A block of 15% of the legislature would be a minority.  However, if 
> something oppressive was attempted against them, they could switch
> sides. 
> 
> However, if all the legislators were elected via a single seat method, then
> the supporters of those 15% would have to wait until the subsequent election
> and it might be to late by then.

This appears to be, more generally, an issue of feedback. Democracy 
itself does better than dictatorship (even from a purely technical point 
of view, as opposed to a moral one) because the people can steer the 
representatives in the right direction. If the rulers get too detached 
from this correction, they get corrupted by the power and bad things happen.

If that's correct, then we should try to find ways of connecting the 
system even more tightly. Proportional representation would fit within 
this idea set for the reasons you point out, or broadly, that as 
minorities change, the representative-voter links update more quickly 
than they do within a majoritarian system.

Predictions based on that idea would consider the ideal to be direct 
democracy. Next to that would be continuous update of representative 
power ("continuous elections"). While both of these might work if we 
were machines, the former scales badly and the latter would put an undue 
load on the voters unless they could decide whether to be part of any 
given readjustment.

If we consider the case where decisions have effects that don't appear 
instantly, it gets more complex. For instance, democratic opinion could 
shift more quickly than the decisions made by one side has time to 
settle or actually do any difference. But even there, if we consider it 
an issue of feedback, we have parallels; in this case to oscillations or 
hunting, and to control theory regarding how to keep such oscillations 
from happening.

The feedback point of view is not an end-all-be-all. If there's a static 
or consistent majority that decide to, as an example, exclude 
minorities, that is "democratic", but still not a good state of things, 
and no amount of making the democracy more accurately translate the 
wishes of the majority into action can fix that, since the majority 
wants to keep on excluding the minority.

> PS
> Anyone know a better free mail system that doesn't cause lots of ??? when
> I post to this group?
The usual suspects should work: Gmail, hotmail, Yahoo; or see the 
Wikipedia comparison page at 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_webmail_providers . Most ISPs 
also provide mail accounts of their own for their subscribers, and 
(without knowing more) I'd assume yours do as well; if that is so, you 
could use that account and a dedicated mail reader like Thunderbird.