[EM] language/framing quibble

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

Fred Gohlke wrote:
> Good Afternoon, Kristofer
> 
> re: "This sounds a lot like what I've previously referred to as
>     'council democracy'."
> 
> I hadn't heard that term before or seen the proposal.  I wonder if the 
> concepts can be merged, perhaps by an analytical critique of the processes.

I first mentioned it here: 
http://listas.apesol.org/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2008-July/021966.html 
to which Abd replied here: 
http://listas.apesol.org/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2008-July/021968.html 
. I said that I think some unions use this process: they have local 
delegates that form councils that elect regional delegates and so on.

> re: "The first problem of council democracy is that it magnifies
>      opinion in a possibly chaotic manner."
> 
> This is, I suspect, a function of the size of the 'council'.  The larger 
> it is, the less opportunity each member has to help form its view.

That is, unless we use proportional representation. If the council is of 
size 7, no opinion that holds less than 1/7 of the voters can be 
represented, so if the opinion is spread too thin, it'll be removed from 
the system; but if you have an extreme of a single layer with PR, 
elected nationally, then the number is much lower.

> An aspect of this question that troubles me is the backward-looking 
> nature of opinion.  Government is (or, at least, ought to be) concerned 
> with the present and the future.  We should prize our representatives' 
> ability to address contemporary concerns with all the resources at our 
> command rather than apply pre-conceived solutions to new, and possibly 
> unknown, circumstances.  In other words, opinion must be subject to 
> intellect.

Yes, that's true. I'm using opinion mainly as a way to show that 
minority properties can be either attenuated or magnified, based simply 
on how the voters are distributed among the councils. This could apply 
to any preference that may be held by only a minority (or even by a 
majority, as the worst case scenario shows): it could be a preference 
for deliberative or intelligent representatives for that matter.

> re: "In the very worst case, an opinion held by (2/3)8 = 4% can
>      be held by a majority of the last triad."
> 
> I lack the expertise to evaluate the math, but I don't understand the 
> point for a different reason:  Is 'an opinion ... held by a majority of 
> the last triad' not but one of a multitude of such opinions?  Does a 
> person's value rest on a single opinion or on the mix of opinions that 
> define the person?  Indeed, is their value not better determined by 
> their ability to implement whatever mix of opinions we perceive them to 
> have?

Again, I use opinions to make the argument simple. Consider it another 
way: each reduction of many triads to one triad has to, by some measure, 
aggregate minority opinion. In the worst case, only the majority counts 
(as this is majority-based and not a consensus mechanism), and the 
minority preference (opinion, share, whatever) gets shaved off. Since 
the reduction is exponential, even more gets shaved off at each 
instance, and these slices may in the end constitute a majority.

> re: "... but the point holds: because the comparisons are local,
>      disproportionality can accumulate."
> 
> I'm not clear on this point.  By 'local', do you mean that the 
> participants are from a distinct locality?  That is certainly true at 
> the very lowest levels, but the distinction blurs as the levels advance. 
>  I'm not sure what will be disproportionate.

Here's an example of size 3 of the effect I'm talking about. I hope my 
(and your) mail software won't mangle this too badly.

For the sake of simplicity, again, we'll consider binary opinion. 
There's a question that has a yes or no answer. The concils are set up 
like this:

L1  YYN YYN NNN
      |   |   |
      Y   Y   N
      |   |   |
      +---+---+
L2      YYN

Here there are four ayes that overrule the five nays, simply because 
they're better positioned. If you look at the second level, it even 
seems like the ayes have 2/3 of the public support, when that is clearly 
not the case.

In an ordinary council democracy, a conspiracy could stack the councils 
in this manner, but in your proposal, because of random selection, that 
would not be possible. Still, it shows a problem of the process by 
showing a true majority getting assigned a minority of the 
representatives and vice versa.

Weighted votes could ameliorate the case, but it wouldn't fix it 
completely, and it may be unwieldy. In the case above: the unanimous N 
would have strength 3 while the Y members have strength 2 each, thus 
giving 58% for the ayes. That's lower than the raw 2/3 ~= 67%, but still 
too high.

> re: "One could reduce the first problem by having a larger group
>      that elects more than one member."
> 
> The question of group size is worthy of considerable thought.  Rather 
> than extend this message, I will post a message titled 'DELIBERATIVE 
> GROUP SIZE and PERSUASION' so we can focus on the issues separately.

Alright, I'll await that message. I'll just say that as far as 
representation goes, it might be possible to quantify it mathematically. 
Using larger councils with PR slows down the exponential reduction (so 
there are more layers), but increases the fraction represented at each 
layer. To what degree these even out, I don't know, but those who know 
mathematics better than I do could perhaps find out.

Also, if the councils are intended to be act directly, one should take 
into consideration Parkinson's observation about committees of varying 
size: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_Inefficiency . If 
that's taken at face value, it would give an upper bound of 20.

> re: "The minimum possible opinion that can attain a majority here
>      has (4/5)9 = 13.4% support among the people."
> 
> Is that a valid assertion?  I fear I'm missing some part of the point. 
> If a candidate feels murder is a felony, if there any reason the 
> candidate could not have 100% support on that opinion among the 
> electorate?  Perhaps more important (to me) is the belief that we should 
> want our candidates to represent the best interest of all the people 
> rather than a subset of them that happen to hold some opinion.

I may have phrased that diffusely. What I meant is that the least 
minority that can end up with a majority of the final triad 
"representatives" is one that holds an opinion shared by 13.4% of the 
people. That's a worst case binary opinion (ayes or nays) scenario.

That's not to say that the reduction can't cope with true majority 
opinions. If a candidate feels murder is a felony, he could have 100% 
support on that opinion, and most of the time, if there's a minority 
that becomes a majority simply by fortuitious placement within the 
councils, it'll have an opinion that's shared by more than 13.4%. The 
worst case scenario only shows how bad it *can* get.