[EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PRfavoringracialminorities
Juho
juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk
Sat Aug 16 22:08:02 PDT 2008
On Aug 16, 2008, at 0:51 , James Gilmour wrote:
> 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.
I was thinking of the regular political parties that otherwise exist
in the country but that are not relevant in these school elections.
> 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.
It is a positive target to allow voters to select their
representatives as freely as possible. There are however also other
criteria (e.g. simplicity, clarity), and in these school elections
also simple lists might well be sufficient. (I don't see lists as a
necessity in these school elections but as an option that would
probably work well enough.)
> Lists of
> any kind will always be constraining. And they are unnecessary (as
> well as, in my view, undesirable).
Constraining in the sense of not being most flexible, yes. Why do you
see lists as 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.
In the case of the school elections the issues may be rather simple.
There can be two different viewpoints to political elections. One
where the voters are seen to express their personal views as well as
they can, and another one where the typical opinion patterns are
first collected into umbrella concepts (that are called ideologies or
parties) (and then people may gather under and influence the
evolution of those ideologies that they associate themselves with).
>
>
>> 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.
I thought you were promoting the idea of allowing the voters to
express themselves in richer ways. Why not go in that direction?
(maybe you think STV-PR is already a good enough solution for all
needs and therefore intermediate solutions are not needed??)
>
>
>> 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.
I see two evolution paths here. One from closed lists to open lists
and trees, and one that uses candidate level granularity and voter
specific ordering. (maybe something like simplicity and structure vs.
freedom of expression)
>
>
>> 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.
Party discipline with sanctions is one level of forcing
representatives to follow the party opinions (quite restricting, may
make some of the representatives just "voting machines", increases
the negotiation and voting power of the party somewhat). Pure
declarations without discipline and sanctions is another level that
serves the voters and media simply by making it clear what each
candidate stands for.
>
>
>>>> 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.
Simplifications as well.
>
>
>>>> (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.
I just note here that it may be useful to have districts that are
about equal in size to keep the "party cutoff levels" (=
proportionality level with respect to minority opinions) roughly at
the same level everywhere (or alternatively use some additional
balancing mechanisms).
>
>
>
>> 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.
I'm used to the idea of parties nominating many more candidates than
they can ever get through. Partly this is to collect votes from all
directions. Partly this may serve also as kind of early primaries
that will make some of the candidates stronger in preparation for the
next elections although they will not be elected this time yet.
>
>
> 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.
Don't know the details of these mechanisms but tickets seem to me
like add-ons that may have both good and bad effects. They do reduce
the problems of vote splitting due to short votes.
>
>
>>> 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.
I tend to favour counting exact proportionalities at national (=whole
election) level ((if one wants PR in the first place)). I also tend
to think that most old stable democracies do not need explicit or
implicit cutoffs "to maintain the stability of the system" since most
of them seem to have more problems with having the same old boring
parties in power continuously rather than having problems with
fighting against too many diverse viewpoints. I also tend to favour
more fine-grained expression of opinions, as in STV or with trees, as
a way to allow the voters to better influence the direction the
system takes (reduces the risk of stagnation and alienation of the
voters from the "parties and politics that continue as before no
matter how we vote").
Juho
>
> James
>
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