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

[Kathy Dopp]

On Mon, Jul 4, 2011 at 11:18 AM, James Gilmour <jgilmour at globalnet.co.uk> wrote:
> This suggestion misses the point.  For any voting system to give full effect to proportional representation of the voters, the
> selection of the candidates to take the seats won by a party must be decided by those who vote in the actual public election  -  not
> decided by any kind of party primary.  After all, the party primary (before the public election) has already decided who should be
> on the party's list and has ordered that list.
>

>
> But it is precisely this "nice" feature of most open-list party-list systems that causes the failure of such systems to produce
> proportionality WITHIN parties.
>
> If you are going to do this properly, to produce a within-party PR result, the voters for each party would have to mark preferences
> against the candidates in their chosen party's list (not necessarily all candidates, depending on the system you choose).  And then
> you would need to use STV-PR (or something like it as you don't like STV) to determine which candidates should take the seats
> allocated to each party.  No such system could be precinct-summable, but that is not a priority for everyone.
>
> And as has already been said, if you are prepared to go the bother of counting what is in effect a separate PR election WITHIN each
> party, why not go all the way and apply your chosen PR system to all candidates across all parties?  That would give the voters real
> choice and would also avoid completely the problem of entrenching the political power of the parties' machines.

James,  As someone on this list already pointed out, such a system as
you suggest does *nothing* to ensure proportionality *within* the
party list because the list of candidates could all have been chosen
by either the leaders or the majority of the political party prior to
the election and thus represent the same group within the party.
Therefore, I said that a party primary allowing all party members to
vote in a PR way would be needed *before* the election in order to
ensure proportionality. Unless, you are suggesting a rule about how
parties can operate requiring that anyone can get on any party's
ballot who wants to, or has some number of signatures, without having
permission of the political party, I suppose.  Not sure what effects
that might have.  Thus, the suggestion for a party primary to ensure
proportionality among voting party members in the primary, at least.


-- 

Kathy Dopp
http://electionmathematics.org
Town of Colonie, NY 12304
"One of the best ways to keep any conversation civil is to support the
discussion with true facts."

Fundamentals of Verifiable Elections
http://kathydopp.com/wordpress/?p=174

View some of my research on my SSRN Author page:
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