[EM] [Election-Methods] [english 94%] PRfavoringracialminorities

[Juho]

On Aug 18, 2008, at 1:14 , Raph Frank wrote:

> In Ireland, it is rare that parties run more than 2+ candidates in  
> a given
> constituency and if then, only the 2 main parties.

Sounds quite limiting from the point of view of allowing the voters  
to decide also which persons will be elected, not only to decide  
which parties will get representatives.

>>> The problem for parties is that the surplus doesn't remain within
>>> the party and leads to a vote management strategy.  (If none
>>> of their candidates have a large surplus, then they get to keep
>>> most of the personal votes for any of their candidates).
>>
>> This is a very interesting real life example on how such "horizontal"
>> preference orders may impact the elections and strategies in them.
>>
>> Do you have a list of the strategies/tricks that are used?
>
> The main one is 'vote management'.  This is where you split up
> the constituency and only allow certain candidates to campaign in
> those areas.
>
> A very popular candidate mightn't be allow campaign at all.  In
> practice, this doesn't always work out.  For example, in Limerick
> one of the FF candidates takes great pride in getting lots of first
> choice votes.
>
> Also, sometimes it might backfire and the very popular candidate
> might fail to get elected as they don't campaign in any specific  
> regions.

Failing to elect a popular candidate that gets votes also from other  
parties means that this party will lose all those "other party  
votes". Electing this candidate with double quota means losing only  
part of those votes.

>> (What I was thinking was basically that if there is one quota of  
>> voters that
>> have opinion X then the representative body could have one  
>> representative
>> that has opinion X. This could apply to parties but also to smaller
>> groupings and individuals as well as other criteria like regions (=>
>> regional proportionality) (and even representation of other  
>> orthogonal
>> groups like women, age groups, religions, races if we want to make  
>> the
>> system more complex).)
>
> This is the party centric viewpoint.  PR-STV is more based on the
> candidate-centric viewpoint.  You vote for someone because you think
> they would make a good representative.

Even if there were no parties proportionality between different  
segments may still be a good thing. (Party like structures are btw  
likely to appear even if the election method wouldn't formally  
recognize them. Also the affiliation of most candidates is probably  
known.)

> Also, constituencies don't need to be assigned integer numbers of  
> seats.

Interesting. What does this mean? Maybe some constituency that has  
citizens worth 10.4 quota could have 10 or 11 seats. Or maybe the  
last (11th) representative would have only 0.4 votes.

Juho





		
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