[EM] Why I think IRV isn't a serious alternative

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

James Gilmour wrote:
> Kristofer Munsterhjelm  > Sent: Tuesday, November 25, 2008 6:27 PM
>> It suggests more than this. If all Condorcet single-round
>> single-winner methods strengthen the duopoly, then the important
>> single-winner elections should either be made multiple-round (that
>> is, have runoffs), or be subordinated to the multiwinner method by
>> some analog of parliamentarism.
> 
> So far as genuine single-office single-winner elections are
> concerned, I doubt very much if the all the costs involved in any
> form of run-off elections could be justified in comparison with the
> results that would be obtained by IRV or Condorcet in real elections.
>  The Australian use of IRV to elect the members of the Federal House
> of Representatives should NOT be used as examples because those are
> not genuine single-office elections.  That use of IRV is a misuse of
> the IRV voting system.  The Australian House of Representatives
> should be elected by a PR voting system.

Ah, I failed to see that possibility; that it's the use of single winner 
methods to legislative bodies that causes the party domination. I'll 
grant that.

> I don't understand what the second part of the last sentence of your
> paragraph means.  If you have a directly elected city mayor, you have
> a directly elected city mayor ,and so you have a single-office
> single-winner election.  If you want to change the system of city
> government from directly elected mayor to an appropriate application
> of "parliamentarianism", that's a quite separate matter. Such a
> decision should most certainly not, in my opinion, be based on any
> presumed defect of a genuine single-office single-winner voting
> system.

I was taking a wider perspective. Consider these two cases for office X:

A. the people directly elect X using a single-winner method.
B. the people elect a PR body Y that appoints X, either as its primary 
duty, or as part of its other duties, where X is responsible to Y 
("parliamentarism").

If we knew that choice A would lead to two-party domination, well, B may 
  suddenly seem a lot more attractive.