[EM] You Can't Have it Both Ways

[Greg Nisbet]

Hello Kevin,

Message: 2
Date: Sat, 18 Oct 2008 20:38:09 +0000 (GMT)
From: Kevin Venzke <stepjak at yahoo.fr>
Subject: Re: [EM] You Can't Have it Both Ways
To: election-methods at electorama.com
Message-ID: <856326.9443.qm at web23302.mail.ird.yahoo.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1

--- En date de?: Sam 18.10.08, Greg Nisbet <gregory.nisbet at gmail.com> a
?crit?:
> Is it right for the
> government to be
> able to design how we voice our opinions to advance their
> goals of social
> engineering?

In my opinion there is no alternative. Any election method, any kind of
political system, has consequences and implications for how political
players and voters will behave. I'd rather have someone thinking about
what those consequences are, than not.

I was more criticizing a mindset than anything else. What your saying is
true, anything we do will affect how voters organize themselves. I'll refine
my stance slightly. I am contrasting two approaches: there is a will of the
people as they express it (p for preference) and what is actually good for
the people (u for utility). (u) is unknowable, but you have some guesses.
When you perceive (u) and (p) do be in conflict, what do you do? I say
default to (p). The examples I cited earlier were governments attempting to
engineer the voting system specifically to restrict expression of (p) when
they perceived it to be in conflict with (u). E.g. preventing
race/ethnicity/caste/religion/language/whatever-based politics from emerging
in South Africa and India (part of the point of that example was that they
took opposite approaches to achieve the same thing.) Now this is actively
modifying (p) so that it does not contradict what the government perceives
(u) to be. A racist party would have a more difficult time coming to power
in South Africa than an equipopular (why not make up a new word?) non-racist
party due to obstacles set up by the electoral method. I think an electoral
method that actively attempts to subvert certain types of (p) is evil, bad,
paternalistic, statist etc. That is not to say I am against this things
being prohibited or discouraged. Simply do so with a constitution instead of
designing an electoral method that accomplishes the task for you. Preventing
the expression of ideas through an electoral method is NOT the way to go.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20081018/041d93b3/attachment-0003.htm>