[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[Juho]

On Aug 24, 2008, at 1:34 , James Gilmour wrote:

> 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.

I treated women just as a random example of voter indicated  
preference to favour some set of candidates.

(This was Kristofer Munsterhjelm's example. I hope he thought the  
same way. This example group has also the other problem that we know  
which of the candidates are women, but I think this is not intended  
to limit the example either. => Just random sets of candidates.)

> And why should there be guaranteed proportionality for women?

In this example, just because that can be derived from the ballots  
cast, no other reasons (although of course there could be in some  
other elections).

>   The logical corollary is guaranteed proportionality for men.

This was not intentional. Since I assumed this to be a random group  
this just indicated a requirement to guarantee that at least  
indicated number of women should be elected (and said nothing about  
the "non-women"). In practice this may lead to proportional  
representation of non-women too but I didn't consider that to be that  
to be a requirement.

Depending on some method treats this kind of freely defined sets, it  
is also possible that only 10% of the voters would indicate support  
to women. This should not be taken to mean that the proportion of  
women should be limited to 10% since many voters may be neutral with  
respect to this particular opinion.

>   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.

This could be purely individual candidate based as in basic STV. Or  
it is possible that there would be a specific women's party or  
women's subgroups for voters who feel strongly about this particular  
question (not excluding also other parties to have many female  
candidates and voters to vote for them).

>
>
>
>> 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.

Yes, a good guess, but there could be also situations where e.g. some  
district has high concentration of members of some racial group and  
most candidates are from that group. Ranking only members of that  
group should in this case not be taken as an indication to support  
all the members of this group at national level and in all  
ideological opinion groups.

>   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.

Yes, the case is quite clear if ALL such candidates are listed first.  
In the example there was also the additional problem of deriving  
national level conclusions from the regional votes (limited to  
candidates of that district).

>
> The key determinant of women's representation in most countries is  
> candidate selection by the political parties, in relation to the
> voting system.

Some methods like open list leave the decision to the voters. Since  
open lists do not guarantee party internal proportionality women  
might in some cases even benefit if the party nominates less female  
candidates than male candidates (since average number of votes per  
female candidate may rise).

Juho


>   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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