[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[Juho]

On Aug 17, 2008, at 21:25 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:

>> (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.

Yes. Candidate X has probably received votes from both voters whose  
opinion is ...X>Y>... and from voters whose opinion is ...X>Z>... .  
Donating all the power to Y is not fair.

> 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.

Yes. Donating the power to the party (or whatever surrounding next  
level group) makes more sense. Voters may have the interest to cast a  
new more focused vote, but at least this approach is quite balanced  
and doesn't lose any votes (from the "host group"). (In STV one might  
need to recount the votes to cover also inheritance towards other  
parties/groupings/candidates.)

> 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.

Yes, smoothing in time is one possible approach to making the changes  
less radical. Politicians may however also in this version be afraid  
of the changes. Knowing that one's support is down at 10% even though  
one still has 15% of the power may be a frightening situation to be  
in. The credibility of the party would suffer although it would still  
have almost all of its original power.

Juho






		
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