[EM] What's wrong with the party list system?

[Juho Laatu]

On 4.7.2011, at 18.59, James Gilmour wrote:

> Juho Laatu  > Sent: Monday, July 04, 2011 4:30 PM
>> (Of course the idea of having proportionally ordered 
>> candidate lists in a closer list election would make voting 
>> in the actual election even simpler. But then one would need 
>> to have a primary to find the ordering for each party.)
> 
> But that would not give proportional representation of the voters, i.e. those who voted in the public election.  Any ordering of a
> party's list by a primary election can, at best, reflect only the views of those entitled to vote in that primary.

Yes, that is not exact proportionality based on the voters of the actual election. But this proportionality is quite good still. It  may be ok to determine some things also in the primary. There are also options like allowing only the party members to vote or allowing everyone to vote. Their results offer two different approaches to the philosophy of proportionality. The latter case is interesting since it can be used also as a strategy. Allowing non-party members to say which candidates are interesting makes the party list more interesting / better from the non-regular party voters' point of view, and may lead to getting more votes in the actual election.

>  That is a
> private, internal matter for each party. For real proportional representation of the VOTERS, the voters must be free to express
> their opinions among the parties and among the candidates within the parties.  That can be done only in the actual public election,
> i.e. all at one time, when all the voters know which parties are contesting the election and can see all the candidates of all the
> parties.

I could accept even arrangements where each party has different rules in their primary, or arrangements where the votes of different parties will be counted in different ways in the actual election. It is true that one would get cleanest proportionality if everything would be decided in one go in one big election with same rules for all. But if votes can be distributed to the parties in some nice and proportional way, they could also have their own (democratically chosen) ways to decide who will get seats within that party. Or maybe the country would set some minimum requirements for nomination and seat allocation within each party. Nomination is anyway usually under the control of the parties nowadays, so they can play tricks there (not to nominate certain candidates, to nominate candidates so that some of them will have good probability of becoming elected).

But I guess I agree with you roughly on which approaches are the cleanest.

Juho


> 
> James
> 
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