[EM] More non-altruistic attacks on IRV usage.

[David L Wetzell]

>>    KM wrote: But positioning yourself around the de facto center is
>>> dangerous in
>>>   IRV. You might get center-squeezed unless either you or your voters
>>>   start using strategic lesser-evil logic - the same sort of logic
>>>   that IRV was supposed to free you from by "being impervious to
>>>   spoilers".
>>>
>>
>> dlw: the cost of campaigning in "less local" elections is high enuf that
>> it's hard for a major party to get center-squeezed.  And if such did
>> happen, they could reposition to prevent it.
>>
>
> KM:If the cost of campaigning is high enough that only the two major
> parties can play the game, then money (what you call $peech) will still
> have serious influence.


dlw:My understanding/political theory is that $peech is inevitable and all
modern democracies are unstable mixtures of popular democracy and
kleptocracy/plutocracy.  To bolster the former, we must accept the
inevitability of the latter.  This is part of why I accept a two-party
dominated system and seek to balance the use of single-seat/multi-seat
elections and am an anti-perfectionist on the details of getting the best
single/multi-seat election.  Deep down, I am skeptical of whether a
multi-party system improves things that much or would do so in my country.


> You might say that this is counterbalanced by the more local elections, so
> that minor parties can grow into major ones and there will be different
> minor-to-major parties in each location -- but you still have to convince
> the more local divisions (counties, cities, etc) to use IRV, and so the
> same problem applies there.
>

dlw: It is counterbalanced by the fact that in a system with more
competitive elections, intere$t$ would need to hedge between the two major
parties and consequently accept a lower, more variable return on their
$peech and  that there'd be turnover wrt which two parties are the major
parties so it'd be a contested duopoly.
It is also counterbalanced by political cultural ways to move the political
center.

>
> KM:Or in other words: if you're right and there are only two major parties
> on the national scene (and so no center-squeeze problem), there will still
> be a center-squeeze problem in, say, Burlington's mayoral elections. Either
> Burlington has only two major parties (but then where would your more-local
> accountability come from?) or it has multiple parties, each of which has
> its own mayoral candidate, and the centermost n of which will be
> susceptible to center squeeze.
>

dlw:Burlington's two major parties would not be the same as the two nat'l
major parties.  Republicans would vote Democrat in Burlington mayoral
elections.   This would add to the ferment of the system as a whole being a
contested duopoly or contribute to  a shift to a new duopoly between
Prog-Dems and Dem-Pubs.

>
> KM:You want local areas to support smaller parties so they can grow and
> challenge the major parties.


dlw:Or that can play the two off of each other to force them to consider
different issues or to reposition themselves on their issues of interests.
 This is what LTPs would do, although they can also support the growth of
minor parties who are contesting the duopoly.  (I have 3 types of parties
in my system: major, minor and LTPs.  I insist that you cannot be both a
minor and a LTP, but that a coalition of LTPs could decide to become a
minor party or vice-versa....


> KM: Well, then the local environment must be conducive to growth. If the
> parties have to strategically balance IRV's center squeeze (which forces
> them towards the wings) against the voter support they get from moving
> closer to the center, that's not exactly conducive to such growth. Nor is
> it so if the voters have to keep the breakdown point of IRV (when minor
> becomes major) in mind when voting. Can the parties really be as flexible
> as you'd like when they're facing the additional constraint of having to
> walk that tightrope produced by the election method itself?
>

dlw:It should be emphasized here that more "more local" elections would
tend to be multi-winner/PR.  This permits LTPs to win seats without having
to move too much close to the de facto center.  This gives them the chance
to move the center and/or possibly center squeeze the two local major
parties in single-winner elections.  I agree this could get complicated,
but I believe that the potential to center-squeeze is what makes the center
tend to become more dynamic.  And the unpredictability is not unlike a
similar undpredictability due to the nonexistence of a Condorcet winner
when there are 3 strong parties.  Plus, unpredictability can force
intere$t$ to hedge further, naturally checking its influence and
facilitating learning.

>
> KM: (It might well be that the nature of IRV, plus cost of campaigning
> means there could only be two national-level parties. I don't think cost of
> campaigning alone would force there to be only two national-level parties -
> e.g. France - but the answer to that question isn't critical to what I
> wrote above. I'm saying that even if we assume what you're saying, you get
> into trouble on a more local level.)
>

dlw:  My point is that more 3-5 seat forms of PR in "more local" would
remedy this problem.  I think there'd be a process of creative destruction
that tends to make for a more dynamic center that makes the two major
parties have to adapt a lot more.

KM:I base my low confidence of PR's capacity to pull stronger towards
competition than IRV does towards consolidation in that IRV pulls stronger
wherever it's been tried. You say they aren't applicable. You may have that
opinion, but then there's little I can show that will help.

dlw: Yeah, but AU uses PR where it reduces, not increases, the number of
competitive elections in the senate and IRV where it does little
value-added, due to de facto segregation in "more local" elections.

KM:So there are two disagreements. Ultimately, I think that multiparty
democracy would be better than your contested two-party rule. I could pull
market analogies for this (oligopolies and cartels), or I could simply say
"it's harder to buy off ten than to buy off two". Here you may claim that
this is because of my political difference if you want to do so.

dlw: I think that the nature of the state as involving the use of the
monopoly on legit uses of violence tends to make multi-party systems become
two coalitions of parties, which ends up having similar dysfunctions as two
major parties.  So my prejudice is that it's less of a diff than people
claim and in both cases, serious changes require political cultural changes
apart from the electoral process.

KM: So I think that we *can* generalize from other IRV nations. You think
we can't, because your rules are different. There have been many IRV
elections (so there are samples to pick), but not very many different
systems of government in which IRV is placed. If I pull 100 local
Australian elections and NatLibs or Labor win in 95 of them, you could say
that's because of the Australian rules so they only count as one sample.

dlw: precisely, I think the kicker is the balance between the two basic
types of election rules and the use of multi-winners and single-winners
strategically so as to increase the number of competitive elections.  This
is not in use in AU.

KM:Well, Burlington just confirms things. The simulations say IRV can fail
to pick the CW, and may squeeze the center out, and the less minor the
minor parties are, the worse it gets. As Burlington agrees with the
simulations, that doesn't count in IRV's favor.

dlw: IRV does not always pick the CW.  But that's not so important so long
as the de facto center trends in the right direction due to elections.

KM:So why would IRV improve things enough over Plurality? That verdict,
too, has to come from somewhere.

dlw: more votes get counted in the final round than with FPTP.  Thus, the
de facto center is closer to the true center and third party candidates can
speak out their dissents and force the major party candidates to take them
seriously.  Why not look at the total number of cities that have adopted
IRV and see what a small fraction have had buyer's remorse?

 dlw: 2.  AU does use IRV/PR in the opposite from ideal mix if the goal is
> to increase the number of competitive elections.   3. WRT France, we
> disagreed on matters of taxonomy.  I classified their top two as a hybrid.
>  You classified it as a winner-take-all and used it to show how IRV has
> been improved upon and could be improved upon further.
>

KM: Let me try your pragmatism for a minute. You say that our disagreement
about top-two is taxonomy. Why should taxonomy matter, though? If I have a
"tacs"-type voting method, and an "intar"-type voting method, both elect
winners to single positions, and the voters know both, but the difference
is that the "intar" method produces a greater diversity of winners than
does the "tacs" method, then why not use the "intar" method?

dlw: Because diversity isn't the only criterion that matters.  If there are
mults, tacs and intars, then a mix of mults and intacs (used in different
sorts of elections) might prove preferable over only using hybrid
intars....

KM:Or, moving back into reality, if we're comparing TTR and IRV, and TTR is
known in the US and shows you can go beyond a dominant two-party system
even without PR, why not use it? Whether TTR is a "proper" single-winner
rule doesn't matter if you're pragmatic.

dlw: Because maybe the greatest need is not to go beyond a dominant
two-party system, but rather to keep the system from tilting to a dominant
single-party system or getting caught in a tailspin where both "major"
parties are at each others throats to become the dominant party.

KM: I say top-two (TTR) is known, since runoff elections are used many
places in the US. FairVote tends to market IRV as "runoffs without the
runoff" there, and as my list showed, that particular form of marketing
carries with it a risk of backfiring.

dlw:sure, but what sort of marketing strategy that simplifies the options
for low-info voters does not risk back-firing?

KM: From what I understand, the answer is "because IRV is linked to STV, so
it's a way of getting PR in the door". But PR can be implemented, as the
proportional representation organizations have shown in the past, without
even mentioning IRV. So if that's the answer, it can essentially be
rephrased as "because that's the way FairVote sells STV, and FairVote's got
all the momentum these days". If *that* is true, I don't see that we should
abandon other methods simply because FairVote made a mistake about how to
market PR.

dlw: Because |Xirv - Xnon-fptp| is relatively small, especially when many
voters are low-info, and in part because of FairVote's leadership  Pirv -
Pnon-fptp  is relatively large.

KM: Also note that I didn't use it to show how IRV "has been improved
upon". Top-two got there first. The most significant point I was making
with top-two was that it *is* possible to have multiparty democracy with
single-member districts. The multi- may not be as multi as with PR, but by
showing this, I can counter statements of the form that "IRV leads to
two-party domination within IRV seats, but so do all single-member rules".
You might use that kind of statement against Condorcet, but you can't use
it against runoffs.

dlw: If we could go back in time and push hard for TTR instead of IRV,
would it have worked (better)?  Maybe.
Let me reframe my statement:  "IRV leads to two-party domination within IRV
seats, but so likely do all single-member single-stage rules" and "it may
very well be a matter of political culture the preference between two major
parties and two major coalitions of parties.  If IRV3/AV3 retains the
former then that does not imply that it's the wrong election rule
alternative to FPTP for a country habituated to two-major party rule.  "

 dlw: 4. Rational choice theory is unrealistic (at least for all political
> elections).  This makes a lot of the Condorcet et al stuff be much ado
> about nothing.  You acceded that fuzziness in the perceptions of voters and
> the positioning of candidates muddied the waters considerably.
>

KM: Condorcet regards not just a single very precise result, but a whole
class of them. Therefore, it is resistant to perturbation, so I don't think
there's "much ado about nothing".

dlw: Condorcet presumes (a majority of) voters have done their homework and
properly ranked an indefinite number of candidates.  When voters do not do
so and rank a subset, it more often leads to cases where there is no
Condorcet Winner.  Or there's the garbage-in-garbage-out problem.  IRV3
assumes that lower rankings are less likely to be meaningful than higher
rankings and thereby limits the info coming in and prioritizes the use of
the top rankings.

KM: As for "muddying the waters", I said that to the extent it does so, it
cuts against IRV. First, I introduced the Yee diagram, where IRV has much
more complex win regions than Condorcet. The thinner and more convoluted
the "border" between win regions, the greater the chance that an election
result will fall in the wrong "country".

dlw: ie, there's greater chance of center-squeeze in a close three way with
IRV than one that uses more info.

KM: Second, I pointed at IRV's amplification dynamic, where near-ties in
one round could lead the method on a completely different path in a later
round.

dlw: This is mitigated by IRV3/AV3.

KM:So I was saying "Alright, you think that rational choice is too
simplistic on account of fuzziness. Well, here's what happens if you take
noise into account, and it's not favorable to IRV".

dlw: I apologize for my fuzzy thinking on this matter.  I think I'm mostly
prejudiced against static models of voter preferences and their purported
implications.  This is me being middle-brow.  In the end, the diffs among
the Xs of election rules tend to be relatively small and so it's damn hard
to elevate the Ps.  If there is a high P then it's better to go forward
with something close to it than to try to get a better rule and elevate its
P.

 dlw:5. You can't divorce what happened in Burlington from the
> real-politik.  It's not a slam-dunk, because the opponents of electoral
> reform are well aware of the divide and conquer strategy.
>

 KM:Are they? I don't think the opponents of electoral reform know about
Condorcet, much less Majority Judgement, Range, Approval, or the likes. The
greater you think the order of magnitude in p_IRV >> p_Condorcet, the less
of a point you'd think there would be for the opponents to even care about
Condorcet.

dlw: They don't need to know much about such to understand that args that
X_Condorcet_etc >> X_IRV tend to lower p_IRV.

KM: To me, it seems more plausible that they said "okay, we want to repeal
this. What can we throw at IRV and have it stick?". Then they might have
looked at pages of people like Warren and thrown nonmonotonicity at IRV.
This would have had a much lesser chance to actually stick if IRV had
behaved properly.

dlw: I agree that the evidence suggests the D candidate was the CW and that
this made it somewhat easier to overturn IRV with a deceptive campaign
against IRV.

KM: When FairVote advertises IRV as the way you can vote without having
spoilers distort the outcome, then people vote, and spoilers distort the
outcome, then that's not just the opponents of electoral reform using
massive marketing machines to convince the people. Draw attention to,
perhaps, but attention or not, there was a majority who preferred Montroll
to Kiss, and that majority got its wish denied in favor of the
Kiss-over-Montroll minority.

dlw: FairVote's marketing of IRV includes statements that are in fact
tendencies.  This is marketing.  It's better to elect Kiss and force
serious changes on the R party than to let R continue to have a chance to
win if the Ps or Ds spoil things for the other party.


dlw: All of which is to say that | X_IRV-X_Condorcet | is likely smaller
> than the electoral analytics purport, while you concede p_IRV is
> considerably greater than p_Condorcet.
>

KM:If FairVote continues on its marketing of IRV and we do nothing, yes,
IRV is more likely to be adopted than Condorcet, at least in the short term.

dlw: I disagree about doing nothing.  There's always enforcing a truce on
IRVish for single-winner and  support for American forms of PR!  That is
hardly nothing.

KM: However, I think that would be unfortunate in two ways. First, I don't
think IRV improves Plurality enough that it'll matter. It'll keep major
parties safe as long as minor parties are minor enough, but not beyond that
point. Therefore, if you do end up with IRV, you keep your uncontested
two-party rule.

dlw: Unless, of course there's such serious unhappiness with the two
current major parties in the US that we'd get two different major parties
with (somewhat) better rules a lot faster?   And then there'd be scope for
further experimentation later down the road...

KM: Second, you may not even keep IRV. If IRV gets it wrong often enough,
or reproduces Plurality's results often enough that it doesn't seem to be
worth it, then the option of reverting it can seem quite tempting. If
FairVote claims that it's a runoff-without-runoff or that you can vote as
you wish without fearing spoilers, and that turns out to be false, then IRV
may not last; and if IRV is considered equal to ranked balloting, then the
immediate reform chance is lost. You might have to go a far more circuitous
route involving augmenting Plurality with MMP - and that wouldn't help
executive positions like Governor or President.

dlw: Well, it's not likely and if we stand by IRV as significantly better
than FPTP for single-winner elections rather than puff up the import of
non-monotonicity, it's not going to happen as much.


   KM:How can we go anywhere from there? If you can say every
>>   application is a special case that doesn't apply in the situation
>>   you have in mind, and if you can say that the theory that remains
>>   has no verification in the form of practical results, then we're not
>>   left with much except restating our relative merit numbers to each
>>   other.
>>
>
>
> dlw:  There is a small data set for IRV apps and an even smaller one for
> the infinite array of alternative electoral rules.
>

KM:There's a small number of rulesets. There's a substantial number of IRV
elections, but most of them (local Australian elections) have the same
overarching ruleset that you would probably argue taints the results.

dlw: I believe my point is that for "more local" elections, IRV or other
single-winner elections won't be that much useful due to de facto
segregation.  We need multi-winner elections to make these elections more
competitive.

dlw: My point is that when you argue "falsely" that | X_IRV-X_Condorcetetal
> |  >> 0, with the latter over the former, you risk lowering |
> p_IRV-p_Condorcetetal |  by making p_IRV drop a lot more than
> p_Condorcetetal rises.  p_Condorcetetal does not rise because there's no
> heir apparent, likely because the Xothers vary relatively little among real
> world voters.
>

KM:The lack of a heir apparent might not be that bad. Committees like the
Rhode Island one might pick the best among near-equals according to what
they deem important. This kind of approach has worked in New Zealand and
led to election reform referenda in parts of Canada (though the voters
there decided not to go for it in two cases, and had a majority but not a
supermajority in the third).

dlw: If overall the Xs aren't that different then it's easy to attack
whatever gets selected on the basis of some criterion.  I myself blogged
about NZ.<http://anewkindofparty.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-new-zealand-may-change-its.html>
They recently were proffered 4 options in what I felt was a manipulative
manner.  I hope they didn't force upon them the use of a plurality vote
among the alternatives.  In the US, we have a plurality voting system,
which implies you gotta have strong agreement on which alternative to FPTP
is going to get pushed.

KM:If you want electoral reform to happen from the bottom up, you don't
need the national government to set up the committee. A state can do so, or
a more local area like a city.

dlw: But those committees may not have the right motives and their
decisions might not carry much weight.

dlw:We can't say it's just a matter of opinion, cuz it's probably not such,
> and so what makes sense to me is to rally around IRV3/AV3 and trust that
> when it's use is prevalent that it'll be the basis for choosing among a
> wider set of electoral reforms, which will have a further ratchet effect in
> expanding upon what is democracy.
>

KM: It's a matter of data either incomplete or considered incomplete. From
your position on what does and does not count as a valid distinct sample,
and from your relative merit ideas, your conclusion follows. I see that. I
can put myself in your shoes, as it were. From mine, my follows. I don't
want to risk that IRV turns out to make no difference or that p_IRV turns
out to be hollow (to collapse when enough scrutiny is brought to it).

dlw: three way competitive races are not common.  They are hard to sustain.
 Thus, it is unlikely that IRV is going not to elect the CW regularly,
thereby making it vulnerable to anti-IRV campaigns.  I don't want to risk
letting a thousand flowers bloom makes it damn hard to rally enough people
around an alternative to FPTP.  The evidence supports that IRV moves the
political center so as to strengthen democracy and weaken negative
campaigning tendencies in FPTP elections.

dlw: And I'm saying the real life sample sizes are too damn small to
> justify rhetorically torpedoing FairVote's marketing/bundling strategy. Why
> not, push for more experimentation with other election rules in Norway or
> elsewhere and trust that the US will find its way in its own way, hopefully
> with some critical learning from across the pond.
>

KM: I don't think there's any support for that here. Modified Sainte-Lague
(with two-tier proportionality - a sort of double list MMP based on the
same counts) is good enough, or so goes the opinion of most of the voters.
A vote is only "wasted" when it doesn't change the party's rounded number
of seats, which happens much less with 169 MPs than with a single
president. Therefore, most voters (who don't vote for parties below the
threshold) feel their vote matters, and we don't get lesser-evil strategy
problems.

In an ideal world, perhaps we'd be using STV with Schulze's adjustments for
the second tier of proportionality. Or perhaps we'd pick our
"representatives" completely randomly with different advisory bodies giving
options for different sorts of legislation, so the representative sample of
the population determine "what" and the advisory bodies determine "out of
which options" and "how". Who knows? In any event, that's very far off:
people are basically satisfied.

(And you may find this of interest: After independence, there were two main
parties in Norway: the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party. While the
Conservative party has remained strong (it's currently third largest by
support), the Liberal Party's support has been below 10% since 1969. Major
party status can indeed change in PR. I find the image of an US equivalent
funny: a Democratic Party at 6-7% support?)

dlw: Well, the Republicans used to be the more progressive major party than
the Democrats, who were really a party coalition of Democrats and
Dixie-crats.  The rise of third parties persuaded the Democrats to become
more progressive and the civil rights movement led to a realignment.   So
we've had some significant changes in our politics without ending the
existence of a 2-party system.  And it's only been in recent decades that
our system has been going to seed with low voter participation and
persistent wedge issues crowding out so many other issues.  These
experiences are why I am "pragmatic".  I believe we can fix a lot of the
worse problems with the US's democracy without moving to an EU-style
system.

KM:If FairVote continues on its marketing of IRV and we do nothing, yes,
> IRV is more likely to be adopted than Condorcet, at least in the short term.
>
> JQ: I'd like to expand on Kristofer's point just a bit. The fact is, it's
not true that we're going to do nothing. I see basically 3 possibilities:
1. Things continue as they are today; IRV has limited and inadequate wins,
mixed with setbacks.
              dlw: Things aren't going to continue, since FairVote is going
to be pushing harder for Am forms of PR.
2. Fairvote's success goes on an increasing curve, and at some point IRV
reaches a tipping point and becomes commonly-used in countries where it
hadn't been before.
           dlw:Or irv paves the way for the consideration of more than one
alternative election rule at a time so that the evolution of electoral
reform becomes more complicated with greater electoral diversity.
3. Some other organization pushes some other system(s), and reaches a
tipping point.
            dlw:IOW, they need to reinvent what FairVote's been working
hard to build up for some time...

JQ: I definitely see why any unbiased observer would say that 1 is more
probable than 2 or 3; but I see no reason to believe that 2 is more
probable than 3. In the US, FairVote had a very good chance with the 2000
election, and got inadequate mileage out of that. So sure, 3 means a lot of
work for people like me, but I personally see it as more likely than 2.

dlw: Why not hybridize?  IRV3 is a possibility and you know you'll want to
support American forms of PR, right?

JQ: The upshot is, sure, IRV might be more likely to be adopted, but only
in the inadequate sense of 1. If 2 or 3 are necessary, then I'd rather
throw my weight behind the one I honestly believe in.

dlw: Hence the bet.

dlw
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