[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

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.
> 
> 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.

The ideal of descriptive representation, I think, would be "the assembly 
should be like the people in all respects but ability to govern". 
There's no objective answer as to whether descriptive representation is 
good in itself, but it could explain what is meant by proportionality 
for (some group), in the context of descriptive representation.

One could also argue towards at least a temporary "discrimination 
counterweight" mechanism, in that it could show the voters that women 
(minorities, etc), can do the work as well as men (or the majority), 
while letting the smaller group become acquainted with politics. The 
election tatonnement, if using a sensitive method, would likely give 
this result sooner or later, but the idea is to make it sooner rather 
than later by weakening the current feedback loop. If it doesn't work, 
one can undo the constraints later.

There's a problem with this way of thinking, as can be made general to 
explicit voting schemes (such as ones based directly on opinion axes), 
and that is that it's impossible to ensure perfect representation on all 
the axes, so one will have to make a tradeoff. For instance, if the 
system requires n% to be of group X, and all of group X are extremely 
radical (support a marginal left-wing party whose general support is an 
order of magnitude less than n), then one has to make a tradeoff between 
the n% and political composition. (In my opinion, that tradeoff should 
favor what the voters want.)

Another problem is that of altering the dynamics in general. If the 
voters aren't the ones who are given the power to change the electoral 
dynamics, then who is? Who is going to determine when the discrimination 
counterweight should be weakened to let the women/minorities become part 
of the usual political process, and at what rate? Ultimately, the voters 
would have to make that decision (through political parties), which 
differs from the voters changing the result directly through elections 
in the way that, say, Pigovian taxes supported by fairly elected parties 
differ from people deciding, individually, to purchase less of goods 
that have significant externalities.

>> 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.

The Norwegian Labour Party also uses this kind of zipping, though it's 
recently been weakened in one district. The reason is that there's a 
candidate that most in the party consider a "must have" in Parliament, 
but the first seat on the list is assigned to the PM, and the third to 
the regional leader. Thus, the (male) candidate would have to displace 
the woman on the fourth position on the list.

The current decision has been claimed valid by a reinterpretation of the 
party rules: instead of having odd numbers be men and even women, the 
rule was reinterpreted to mean that the fraction of men and women on the 
list must be close to equal. Of course, this makes it possible to move 
all the women to the bottom of the list, reducing the balance significantly.

And yes, this shows the kind of power parties have under closed list PR 
that they would not have if subject to a party-neutral method.