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

[Juho]

On Aug 16, 2008, at 0:48 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

> 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.

I don't see the burden to voters as a big problem since the system  
allows some voters to follow and influence politics daily and some to  
react only on a yearly basis.

(Continuous elections could also increase the level of participation  
in decision making in the sense that old votes could be valid for a  
long time even if the voter wouldn't bother to change the vote often.  
Well, on the other hand the votes must have some time/event limits  
after which they become invalid. Otherwise the system would e.g. make  
any changes in the party structure very "unprofitable".)

> 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.

When thinking about the problems of continuous elections and direct  
democracy maybe the first problem in my mind is the possibility of  
too fast reactions. Populism might be a problem here. Let's say that  
the economy of a country is in bad shape and some party proposes to  
raise taxes to fix the problem. That could cause this party to  
quickly lose lots of support. These rather direct forms of democracy  
could be said to require the voters to be more "mature" than in some  
more indirect methods in the sense that the voters should understand  
the full picture and not only individual decisions that may sometimes  
even hurt them. In an indirect democracy painful decisions are  
typically not made just before the elections. This is not an ideal  
situation either. But all in all, the more direct forms of democracy  
seem attractive if the voters are mature enough.

Juho


> 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.
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for  
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