[EM] PR favoring racial minorities

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Juho wrote:
> 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.)

It can be treated as either. Some properties, like whether a candidate 
is a woman, can be objectively ascertained. Others, like opinion, can't 
be determined as readily - all we have for opinion is what the 
candidates actually say, as well as their past history, and there's no 
mechanism that can say "yes, he truly believes this" in contrast to "no, 
he's only saying it because that's what the voters want to hear".

Reading my past posts, I intended "woman" to be just another binary 
property, but in some other branches of this thread, I've also 
considered methods that use the objective verification property of 
"being a woman" (to balance assemblies if that is desired).

>> 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.

I was going to say that it'd seem, from a binary point of view, that 
valuing proportionality x of those in a given set implies valuing 
proportionality (1-x) of those not in the set. But the binary point of 
view is wrong. As you say, many people would have no particular interest 
in which way the distribution goes. A variant of the argument may still 
apply, though. If 10% really want women candidates and 90% don't care, 
then having 11% or 9% would be equally bad (presumably) from the point 
of view of the 90% of the voters that don't care. Therefore, it's not 
critical that there are >10% women candidates. The slack will be more 
taut in the less-than direction (because the women-prefering voters 
would have no problem with a superproportional allocation of women), but 
it wouldn't be absolute since the other 90% don't seem to care, making 
this a less important issue than if, say, 20% preferred women, 10% men, 
and the other 80% had no opinion.

>> 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.

A better estimate would be whether more candidates of a certain group 
are elected than one would expect from a random sample of the community 
or district in question. Even that isn't foolproof, because there may be 
some properties that people who desire to be a part of the political 
process (i.e. candidates) tend to have with greater frequency than those 
who don't.