[Election-Methods] Partisan Politics

[Juho]

Single-seat districts (the usual ones) provide very tight regional  
representation / proportionality. Political proportionality on the  
other hand is very poor.

Multi-member districts provide less strict regional proportionality  
but better political proportionality.

The number of seats per district is important. If one district has 5  
seats and another has 10 seats the chances of small groups to get  
their candidates elected is different. The number of seats sets a  
limit on the size of the parties that they must reach to get their  
first seat (the case with one seat only is an extreme case that  
typically favours two large parties with about 50% support each).

In Finland there is currently one electoral reform proposal (with  
support of majority of the parties) under discussion. The current  
proposal gets rid of the current calculation rules that threat  
different size districts differently. The basic idea is that the  
number of representatives that each party will get will be counted  
first at national level, and then the seats will be distributed to  
the districts so that both political and regional proportionality  
requirements will be met.

In the proposed system votes of a small group will thus be summed up  
at national level. Even if the votes at some district would not be  
enough to get even one seat the sum of votes in several districts may  
be enough to guarantee one seat (that will be allocated to that group  
in one of the districts).

(The proposed system contains currently also a general threshold  
level that parties need to reach to get any seats, but that's another  
story.)

The system is not STV based but open party list based, so it is quite  
straight forward to sum up the votes of candidates of each opinion  
group although the candidates are different at different districts.

It is thus possible to implement both regional and political  
proportionality at the same time. And that is possible even if the  
voters (of small parties/groupings) would be "forced" to vote  
candidates of their own district.

Juho



On May 18, 2008, at 20:00 , Jonathan Lundell wrote:

> On May 18, 2008, at 9:05 AM, Fred Gohlke wrote:
>
>> re: "Political proportionality is the one that people most often  
>> discuss since the election methods/systems typically provide  
>> regional proportional automatically (e.g. in the form of single  
>> seat districts and forcing all voters to vote at their home  
>> region, without asking about the opinion of the voter)."
>>
>> Should I infer that there is a basis for opposing regional  
>> proportionality?  I ask because it never occurred to me to  
>> question the wisdom of "forcing all voters to vote at their home  
>> region".  Indeed, even the idea of "force" never occurred to me.   
>> I am of the opinion that voting is a right and that one's home  
>> region is the most logical place to exercise that right.
>
> The objection is to "spending" all of our opportunity for  
> proportionality on regional proportionality; we're looking at the  
> fundamental argument for PR.
>
> J S Mill makes the case better than I can: http:// 
> etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/m/mill/john_stuart/m645r/ 
> chapter7.html [John Stuart Mill: "Of True and False Democracy;  
> Representation of All, and Representation of the Majority only",  
> Chapter 7 of Considerations on Representative Democracy (1861)]
>
> But of course I'll take my own shot at it, through example.
>
> California has an 80-seat state assembly, with 80 somewhat  
> gerrymandered single-seat districts. Ignoring the subtleties of  
> quotas and the mathematics of PR, let's say for convenience that  
> each seat represents 1/80 of the voters of the state. As a voter,  
> I'd like to be able to form a voting coalition with enough like- 
> minded voters to elect a representative. Depending on how strongly  
> I feel about which issues, how likely is it that I'll find enough  
> like-minded voters within my district to send a representative to  
> Sacramento? Not very likely, unless my some stroke of luck my  
> interests happen to be aligned with the major party with a  
> (probably gerrymandered) majority in my district.
>
> A Republican voter in San Francisco has no chance of direct  
> representation in Sacramento, nor does a Democrat in Redding. Nor  
> does a Green or Libertarian anywhere in the state, even though both  
> parties have in aggregate enough members to justify 1/80 seats.
>
> A typical STV proposal for the California assembly has multimember  
> districts of 5-10 seats, preserving a degree of geographic locality  
> at the expense of raising the threshold for minority coalitions.  
> Notice, though, that if the state were treated as a single 80-seat  
> district, there'd be nothing under an STV system to prevent voters  
> from forming geographically (vs party or issue) based coalitions.  
> The difference with that these geographic coalitions become  
> voluntary, based on common geographically based interests; they're  
> not imposed (forced) on the voters by the district system.
>
> So, "forced" in that respect.
>
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for  
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