[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[James Gilmour]

Juho  > Sent: Saturday, August 23, 2008 9:56 PM
> Trying to guarantee proportionality for women at national level may  
> be tricky if there is no "woman party" that the candidates and voters  
> could name (well, the sex of a candidate is typically known, but that  
> is a special case). 

I think you need to define what you mean by "proportionality for women at national level".  Do you mean numbers of representatives
proportional to the numbers of women among the registered electors (typically 52%), or among the voters (women frequently
predominate), or do you mean proportional to the extent that the voters wish to be represented by women?  These criteria are all
quite different, and none of them is the usual 50:50 that is commonly called for.

And why should there be guaranteed proportionality for women?  The logical corollary is guaranteed proportionality for men.  Just
for the record, I am opposed to both and would be very happy if 60% or more of the MSPs in the Scottish Parliament were women
PROVIDED we had voted them into office by our free choice with a suitably sensitive voting system.  If we are going to guarantee
proportionality to eliminate sex discrimination, we must logically follow with proportionality to eliminate other discriminations
that have been officially recognised, starting most obviously with those that have already been enshrined in law: race, religion,
disability, age.  Once you start down that anti-discrimination road there is no logical end point.  Better by far to change to a
sensitive voting system that gives the voters free choice among all the candidates and encourages the political parties and other
nominating groups to offer the widest choice of candidates to the voters, representative of the local community.



> If some voter ranks all women in his/her vote in  
> his/her own district first we can not tell if his/her intention was  
> to vote for these candidates because they are women or for 
> some other reason.

That is true, but such ranking is currently so unusual that I think it would be a fair assumption.  At public meetings explaining
preferential voting in preparation for the STV-PR local government elections last year, I always made a point of telling the
audience that they could vote for ALL the women before they voted for ANY of the men, if that was what they wanted.

The key determinant of women's representation in most countries is candidate selection by the political parties, in relation to the
voting system.  A party may select 50% women candidates, but if the male candidates are selected disproportionately for the winnable
seats in FPTP single-member district elections, the women will still be unrepresented.  And the voters will have had no say in the
matter.  The main reason that the representation of women was so high after the first MMP elections to the Scottish Parliament
(1999) was that the Labour Party (the largest party) had a policy of compulsory "twinning" of adjacent single-member districts (one
man, one women) and compulsory "zipping" (man, woman, man, woman, etc) of the closed party lists for the eight electoral regions.
Again, the voters had no say in the matter.

James

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