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

[Juho Laatu]

One possible unwanted feature in Asset like methods is that they make it possible for the candidates to trade with the votes. The voters may trust their candidate, but they should not trust them too much, since in extreme cases they might even sell their valuable vote assets to someone.

One straight forward fix to this problem is that the candidates would declare their preferences already before the election. In that case the voters would vote for these predeclared preference orders, and the used method could be STV or some other ranking based method. This approach could allow also voters to provide full rankings themselves, or it could allow short voter given preference orders to be completed to longer rankings e.g. so that the preference order of their first favourite will be used to continue the given preference order.

Since it may be too tedious to study the preference orders of all potential candidates one could simplify the structure. That could lead to a tree based election where the votes to some candidate will be inherited in a tree so that a vote to a candidate would support the smallest branch in the tree that contains this candidate. Then to the next smallest branch etc. The tree could be ordered also so that not only the leaves but also the branches of the tree would contain candidates. Branch candidates would be elected first, leading to a preference order among the candidates of that branch.

The basic idea of the tree is that it os easy to understand and politicians must declare their true preferences. Trees are not anymore far from basic lists. They just give a better structure to the political space.

My point was to show how the problems of Asset could be fixed and that there is a continuum of methods between Asset and basic list methods.

Juho



On 4.7.2011, at 17.33, Jameson Quinn wrote:

> 
> 
> The nice feature of existing party list methods is that it allows the
> election of a large number of candidates to a large national body of
> legislators without requiring voters to rank individually a huge
> number of candidates.
> 
> Yes, this is the main reason for people who favor party list systems. Note that this same advantage can be given, without giving any centralized power to party structures, by using Asset or Asset/STV blends.  These can include ballots of any complexity - from vote-for-one to full ratings ballots - and many different proportional vote assignment/transfer rules. They can even do things similar to mixed member systems, in which all votes are local but vote transfers can be regional/national. And parties can voluntarily recreate the effects of either open or closed lists within such systems. The only downside to asset-like PR systems is that they require the candidates to be somewhat more sophisticated. 
> 
> Thus, in general, I prefer such systems to party lists. Also, with my house in Guatemala, I've seen close-up how extremely dysfunctional closed party list systems can get.
> 
> JQ
> 
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20110705/e0d216b7/attachment-0004.htm>