[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

>> 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.

Hence the "unless they could decide whether to be part of any given 
readjustment" part. Irrespective of that, there's also the 
paradox-of-choice type load that one gets upon permitting voters to 
alter their decisions at any time, but perhaps the voters would get used 
to it and down-adjust the effort they exert at any given time, reasoning 
that if they "elect wrongly", they can fix it at any later time.

> (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".)

Another option that presents itself is that of candidates handing over 
their power to their "successors", but one should be very wary of 
unintended consequences if one makes power transferrable in 
non-transparent ways. Party list elections could just have the party 
instead of the candidates gain the power, but I think that would defeat 
some of the dynamic purpose of continuous elections, and possibly lead 
to pseudoparties whose only purpose is to shield the candidates from 
changes of opinion.

>> 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.

 From the feedback point of view, populism would be another form of 
overreaction or opinion shifting too quickly. Consider the tax case. For 
the sake of the argument, let's say that the tax raise is going to make 
things better in the long run. Then the problem is that the adjustment 
mechanism (the people using the election system) react too quickly. A 
common way of fixing this for ordinary feedback systems is to introduce 
smoothing. In a continuous election, this may take the shape of that, if 
you change your vote, the power given to the previous candidate slowly 
decreases while the power given to the new candidate slowly increases 
instead of happening immediately. This would "take the edge off" 
populism and other overreaction-related problems while avoiding the 
representative problem of "don't do anything before the elections", 
since "the elections" can still be any day of the year, and a different 
day for different supporters of any given candidate.

Still, there are limits. When dealing with machine feedback loops, one 
usually has the luxury of being able to tune loop characteristics (such 
as the degree of smoothing, reaction to increasingly large changes, and 
so on) beforehad, which wouldn't be applicable for a political process 
since the situation of the world may change with time. Second, there's 
no sure way of knowing, ahead of time, whether the tax (in the example) 
really would benefit the society or not, at least not without being 
given more data; so smoothing could both harm and help, and knowing what 
level to set it to, even if we had a completely unbiased and trustworthy 
engineer to adjust the dynamics, seems to be a problem for which we 
can't even know whether any given answer is correct. It would be like 
setting the federal interest rate, yet more difficult.