[EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PR favoring racialminorities

[Juho]

There could also be systems where the number of seats per district is  
rather small but PR is counted at the top level. This means that you  
can tweak the system to get a bit more locality and a bit more  
political proportionality at the same time. (This of course has a  
cost, e.g. making the set of elected candidates at each district a  
bit more random (since also the election wide level will influence  
the local selection of representatives).)

Juho


On Aug 17, 2008, at 22:02 , Jonathan Lundell wrote:

> On Aug 17, 2008, at 11:34 AM, James Gilmour wrote:
>
>> The evidence from countries which presently have single-member  
>> districts but are considering reform of the voting system, is that
>> electors want a balance between proportional representation of the  
>> main political groups AND guaranteed local representation.  It is
>> difficult enough to convince them that with STV-PR they really can  
>> get both with modestly sized multi-member districts.  It would be
>> impossible to persuade them of the benefits of PR reform if all  
>> the members were to be elected at large (UK House of Commons = 646
>> MPs, Scottish Parliament = 129 MSPs).  STV-PR was once viewed in  
>> this utopian way in the UK (in the 1880s), but now it is promoted
>> by practical reformers who are more attuned to the concerns of  
>> real electors.
>
> A related problem here in California is the small size of our state  
> legislature, relative to the state's population. The California  
> state assembly (our lower house) has only 80 seats. Compare that to  
> the UK's 646; California has a population 60% of the UK's.  
> California has 5-6X the population of Scotland, but less than 2/3  
> the seats.
>
> As a consequence, California's single-member Assembly districts are  
> already quite large, so that it's prohibitively expensive for most  
> candidates to mount a viable campaign. Five-member districts would  
> be to my way of thinking an absolute minimum (more would be  
> better), but without increasing the assembly size, such a scheme  
> would lead to enormous districts.
>
> (For non-US readers, state-house district sizes vary widely  
> (wildly) from state to state. California has nearly 500K residents  
> per seat; Maine has ~8500.)
>
> Some PR reforms have proposed a modest increase in the size of the  
> Assembly (eg from 80 to 120), but, while desirable in itself, this  
> would to the difficulty of implementing PR at all, given that any  
> change gets resisted.
> ----
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