[EM] Quotas

[Greg Nisbet]

On Thu, Oct 23, 2008 at 11:46 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
<km-elmet at broadpark.no> wrote:
> Greg Nisbet wrote:
>>
>> You will be represented whether you like it or not...
>>
>> Some countries have women's quotas, racial quotas, geographical quotas
>> etc.
>>
>> What are your thoughts on these?
>>
>> I think it is generally a bad idea to impose this sort of requirement
>> on the people. Manipulation of the will of the people "for their own
>> good" isn't right. The government, however enlightened it considers
>> itself, should not subvert the will of the people. It is important
>> that the legislature be accountable and completely under the control
>> of the people.
>>
>> If electoral intervention bad is not a good enough argument... try this.
>>
>> Who decides which groups are worthy of representation and which are
>> excluded from protection?
>>
>> Wouldn't this procedure elect a suboptimal candidate? There is no
>> guarantee that the people's choice would be replaced by someone with
>> similar issues. This would prevent representation in cases where the
>> candidate mandated by the quota replaced a dissimilar candidate.
>>
>> Does this help or hinder actual social change?
>>
>> This is an important argument. It is not clear to me that women's
>> quotas make society less sexist, racial quotas less racist, or
>> geographical quotas less balkanized. Looking to the example of
>> geographical quotas that we have in the Untied States, it has fostered
>> regionalism, in fact. Pork barrel spending is at an all-time high and
>> congressmen bicker over policies based on which state they help or
>> hurt.
>
> I'll reply to this quickly as I'm about to leave this computer for a while.
> I think that such quotas may be of use in the short term, to get the system
> on the right track, but ideally, the election method should be based just on
> the voters. Thus it would be a way of jumping from a local optimum to a
> better local optimum, if you see it in system terms, or of incorporating
> groups so that they can lift themselves up afterwards. Of course, this
> relies on very powerful checks so that those who get superproportional voice
> don't decide they like it that way and stop the quota from being phased out
> later. Also, the maintainers would be sufficiently wise to know when to
> phase it out - not too early and not too late.

To what extent is this the right track if the voters are not doing it
themselves? If it requires so much good judgment on behalf of the
government to phase it in and phase it out correctly then is it really
right to trust them with this power. I mean even if the goals are
egalitarian and such does it actually catalyze representativeness and
is this actually useful. Look for instance at regional quotas for
Congress (not usually defined as such but that IS what they are), has
this made politics more inclusive... uh no... it has in fact divided
the country further. Notice, for instance, red state blue state
politics. It has at least preserved excessive regionalism and probably
exacerbated it. It would be much worse if politics between members of
different races, sexes, religions, income whatever became so
formalized.