[EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PRfavoringracialminorities

[James Gilmour]

Juho  > Sent: Friday, August 15, 2008 8:27 PM
> I understood that in this case the parties were irrelevant and  
> therefore basic lists may be sufficient to put in place a structure  
> that covers all the relevant questions.

If by "party" we mean a formal (or registered) group with internal disciplinary procedures, then "parties" are irrelevant.  But you
cannot have "lists" without some comparable formal procedures.  And in any event, "basic lists" are never sufficient, if you believe
that the essence of representative democracy is allowing the voters to select their representatives as freely as possible.  Lists of
any kind will always be constraining.  And they are unnecessary (as well as, in my view, undesirable).  So why bother with them when
there is a "free-choice" alternative already available?  If the voters want to vote by party, or by declared policy, or by sex (vote
for all the women before any of the men!) or by race or by religion or by disability, or by policies X, Y or Z, or by whatever, that
is the voters' choice and in a properly representative democracy we should go as far as we can to accommodate such wishes
(consistent with any other constraints the electors may wish, like localism).


> In theory, if there are more than one issue, e.g. X and Y, then there  
> could be more lists, e.g. for "X and Y", "X and not Y", "not X and Y"  
> and "not X and not Y".

But this is all so constricting and constraining and so unnecessary.


> I mentioned also the tree option to cover more complex structures.  
> (And it is possible to extend from that, but that will get more  
> complex then, maybe deleting the basic simplicity of voting in list  
> and tree based methods.)

Again, unnecessary.


> One thing worth noting when comparing list based and STV style  
> methods is that although the voters have all kind of opinions the  
> candidates represent a more limited set of opinions. One candidate  
> could be said to have opinions X and Y in that order of importance.  
> As a result that candidate could represent "section Y of party X".  
> Probably also the voter has some order of importance in her opinions,  
> and could therefore vote either "section Y of party X" or "section X  
> of party Y". Very complex preferences will be lost in the rounding  
> errors in any method.

This is very true.  Each voter must decide for himself or herself which is the best fit of their own views in n-dimensional issue
space to the one dimensional array of preferences for the candidates who have offered themselves for election.  All sorts of
compromises will be involved in that condensation for each and every voter, whether or not those voters are aware of that.


> Lists and trees are not quite as flexible as STV but on the other  
> hand in them voting is much simpler.

Yes, it is much simpler just to put one "X" against one list of 12 party-ordered candidates as we do in each of the eight electoral
regions for the Scottish Parliament.  Then by the magic of d'Hondt, seven candidates from the competing lists are elected to the
seven top-up seats in each region.  But I don't think representative democracy is best served by such simplification.  It would be
more of a challenge to mark in order of preference four or five candidates from each of the larger parties and one or two from
several smaller parties, plus a few independents.  (We had 23 "lists" in two of our electoral regions in the 2007 elections and 15
or 16 in the other six regions.)  But I had no trouble at all in marking preferences that made sense to me for all 10 of the
candidates who stood in my local 4-member ward to be elected to Edinburgh City Council by STV-PR on the same day.


> There can be also some benefits in forcing the candidates to declare  
> their association and priorities. If they are not declared that opens  
> some doors to more vague marketing, promises in all directions and  
> possibility that the candidate will promote different things after  
> being elected than what the voter expected.

But without the sanction of party discipline such "forcing" is either impossible or meaningless.


> >> STV-PR gives the voters some  flexibility
> >> that the list (or tree) based methods do not give but here I didn't 
> >> see anything special that would speak against the use of lists.
> >
> > STV-PR does not provide "some" flexibility  -  STV-PR provides
> > complete flexibility for each voter to express her or his personal
> > preferences among all the candidates on whatever basis that  
> > individual voter chooses.  Your preferences and mine may be identical,
> > but it is probably that we have placed the candidates in that  
> > common order for quite different reasons.
> 
> STV-PR is more flexible than list based methods ("some" or more than  
> "some"). Sometimes that flexibility may also bring problems like long  
> votes and need to analyze all the candidates. If there are very many  
> candidates it could be useful to allow also inheritance by default  
> (for short votes) (to parties or to candidate's own favourites  
> (includes also risks like in Fiji)) or group names in votes, e.g.  
> MyCandidate>MyParty. (Hybrid methods between lists and STV are thus
> also possible.)

That would certainly be possible, but it would be an unnecessary complication.


> >> (Lists may also be more practical in some cases, e.g. if  the number 
> >> of candidates is high.)
> >
> > The largest STV-PR election I know of had 450 candidates for 120
> > places, but I would not recommend such a high district magnitude!
> 
> What was the number of districts here? Was this a single district  
> with 120 seats or are the 120 places a sum of smaller districts?

Sorry, I should perhaps have said explicitly "within one electoral district", hence my reference to a district magnitude I would not
recommend.  This was the first STV-PR election for a medical professional council that covered the whole UK and had many medical
disciplines within it.  After one or perhaps two such elections, they split the UK proportionately into four territorial electoral
districts (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland).

 
> > To allow for diversity in representation you also need a reasonable
> > minimum, so that the larger parties will be "forced" to nominate
> > at least two candidates each, so that the voters get some choice  
> > within parties as well as between them.
> 
> Are there problems with having too few candidates somewhere? 

Yes, most definitely.  In Scotland our 1,222 councillors (in 32 Councils) were all elected from wards returning either 3 or 4
councillors.  In many wards even some of the larger parties put up only one candidate, so that the supporters got no choice of
representative WITHIN the party.  You'll find a lot of excellent analysis of those 2007 Scottish Local Government elections on the
Electoral Reform Society's website.  Many of us campaigned for more flexibility in district magnitude while the legislation was
going through the Scottish Parliament, but 3s and 4s was a done deal between the then coalition government parties.  There is no
good reason why cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh should not have wards returning 7 or 8 councillors.  Then the larger parties would
have no option but to offer real teams of candidates and their supporter would choose among them.



> At least  
> in list based elections it seems that parties prefer nominating many  
> candidates rather than one or few. 

In the UK this looks more like a political virility symbol than anything else.  Scotland elects seven MEPs for the European
Parliament by closed-list party-list PR (d'Hondt calculation).  It is considered a sign of political weakness if any of the major
parties does not nominate seven candidates even though all the opinion polls for months before the elections show that none of the
parties will ever win all seven seats.  It is much the same with the closed-lists for the regional part of the MMP elections to the
Scottish Parliament, where each registered party is allowed to nominate up to 12 candidates for each regional list.


In STV there might be some risk of  
> vote splitting when parties nominate multiple candidates (since  
> voters could either forget to rank their own party candidates or rank  
> candidates of other parties instead of them). Maybe also the single- 
> member tradition has some psychological influence here.

There are some very large difference in voter behaviour in STV-PR elections.  In Malta, voting the party ticket is almost universal,
to the extent that the two main parties sometimes nominate 12 candidates for the 5-member electoral districts.  (The "spares" are
used to fill any casual vacancies during the life of the Parliament.)  In Ireland, typically fewer than half of the supporters of
either of the two larger parties will vote the party ticket.  In Northern Ireland, voter behaviour lies somewhere between these two.


> >   For public elections,
> > however, there is practical trade-off because electors, especially
> > those brought up with decades of single-member districts (UK,
> > USA), will want a guaranteed level of local representation.  Where  
> > you can strike the balance in that trade-off will almost
> > certainly vary from country to country.
> 
> Yes, there is a trade-off between locality of the representatives and  
> accuracy of proportional representation (it is also possible to have  
> both, but that means some other "rounding errors" like not electing  
> the most popular candidates in each district). If the number of seats  
> in each district is higher than one then the idea of one  
> representative who knows that she represents all the local voters is  
> already gone (there will be uncertainty on who represents whom) => it  
> is then easier to go for higher seat numbers per district too.

District magnitude is about more than the precision of the proportionality obtained.  It is also about the limit of the diversity of
representation that can be obtained.  If you elect only 3 members together, only three "groups" can possibly obtain direct
representation.  If you elect 7 members together, seven different "groups" could obtain direct representation.  Of course, the
voters in the larger district may not want direct representation for seven different "groups"  -  they may give 3 seats to one group
and 4 seats to one other group, but at least the potential was there and the outcome was the voters' choice.  I'll leave the myths
about the wonders of representation and accountability in single-member districts for another occasion  -  in any event, these myths
are propagated mainly by politicians who are opposed to reforms that would give more representative results.

James

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