[EM] Challenge: two-party methods

[James Gilmour]

Juho
I regret to have to say that I find your approach confused and confusing, and basically anti-democratic  -  which is a surprise and
a disappointment.

There is nothing at all wrong with a "two party system" if that is what the voters really want.  But it is something else altogether
to devise or manipulate a voting system so that it will produce a two party result when that is not the wish of the voters.  There
is nothing inherently good or bad about a two party system, provided it does fairly reflect the wishes of the voters.  Of course,
such a system would be bad if it did not fairly reflect the wishes of the voters.

If we are discussing voting systems for use within a "representative democracy" to elect a parliament or assembly, I cannot see how
there can be any escape from the requirement for "democracy" in the voting system.  A voting system may have one effect or another,
and its effects may be tolerated by the electors, but that is quite different from deliberately devising a system to crush the
smaller parties.  That can only be anti-democratic.

All political parties are coalitions, some broad, some narrow.  So there is a very simple solution to the spoiler problem where
single-party majority government is required, especially with the "55% seats" rule for the largest minority.  If the potentially
largest party finds itself second, all it has to do is broaden its internal coalition to take in the supporters of the most
acceptable of the spoiler parties so that it will secure first place.  The attraction for the spoiler party is that it will become
part of the government.

One could argue that plurality in single-member districts, as in the UK and the USA, is a voting system designed for a two party
political system (ignoring its other defects).  Conservative and Labour in the UK and Republicans and Democrats in the USA no doubt
see this system as a mechanism for entrenching and reinforcing the two party system.  It is thus interesting, that in England there
is a three party system and in Scotland a four party system, and these emerged under plurality in SMDs.  What happened in these two
countries, for different reasons, was that the two main parties were not able to broaden their coalitions and successfully reach out
to the third and fourth parties and the supporters of the third and fourth parties.  It is my view that in England, at least, the
political landscape could have been quite different if the UK had used STV-PR to elect the Westminster Parliament since 1945.

On a smaller point, I find your use of "single winner" undesirably confusing.  Surely "single-winner" should refer only to
"single-seat elections"?  The term has to mean something very different if you try to apply it to multi-seat elections for a
representative assembly.  In a single-seat election the best you can do is guarantee representation to the majority of those
participating in the vote  -  and you deny any representation to all the minorities.  But in a multi-seat election the situation can
be, and should be, completely different, in that you can guarantee representation to all significant points of view.  So I think we
should always reserve "single-winner" for "single-seat" elections and use "single-party majority" for multi-seat elections.  The
concepts are quite different.

James



Juho Laatu  > Sent: Saturday, July 09, 2011 2:53 PM
> 
> > On 9.7.2011, at 16.14, James Gilmour wrote:
> > Juho Laatu  > Sent: Saturday, July 09, 2011 10:35 AM
> >> After some recent discussions and thoughts around two-party
> >> systems I thought it would be interesting to discuss 
> >> two-party systems also in a more positive spirit. The 
> >> assumption is thus that we want the system to be two-party 
> >> oriented. We want to have two strong parties, and one of them 
> >> should rule. We want to allow only well established parties 
> >> with wide support to rule. The first obvious approach is to 
> >> ban all other parties than the two leading parties. But maybe 
> >> we don't want  to be so brutal. Let's not ban the possibly 
> >> already existing, much liked and hopeful third parties. It is 
> >> also good to have some competition in the system. Let's not 
> >> allow the two leading parties think that they don't have to 
> >> care about the voters and they can do whatever they want, and 
> >> stay in power forever.
> > 
> > This is a very strange proposal, all the more so because your 
> > principal objective is not clear.  Is your objective to manipulate the 
> > voting system so that all the smaller parties are more or  less crushed 
> > out of the political system, leaving only two?
> 
> The idea is not to manipulate a working system but to provide 
> an ideal two-party system. The rules and ideals of a 
> two-party system may be different from other systems, so the 
> method may seem strange if seen as a proposal for some other 
> kind of elections (e.g. for multi-party countries). There may 
> thus be different elections with different kind of 
> requirements. Here the requirement is to allow the strongest 
> parties to rule (except that it must be possible also for the 
> small parties to become large parties one day). Small parties 
> are thus not crushed out of the political system. They are 
> not allowed to win yet, but they are well nursed in the hope 
> that one day they will become large parties.
> 
> >  Or is your
> > objective to ensure single-party majority government where the 
> > government comes directly from the national elections?
> 
> The target is to have a single-party government. Majority of 
> voters should prefer it over the second largest party (in my 
> example method at least) but there is no requirement of 
> having an absolute majority of first preferences (in my 
> example the votes were rankings, so the winner may be ranked 
> e.g. second in many ballots).
> 
> > 
> > The first of these is not, to my mind, compatible with any definition 
> > of democracy.
> 
> Ok, I think I escaped that criterion although the intention 
> is not to let the small parties rule tis time.
> 
> > 
> > If single-party majority government is the objective, that is very 
> > easy to implement.  If no party (in fairly representative
> > elections) wins more than half of the seats, allocate 55% 
> > of the seats to the party with most votes nationally and divide the
> > remaining seats proportionately among the remaining 
> > parties.  This has already been done in national public elections, e.g. in Italy
> > in the 1920s, when the 'premium' was two-thirds not 55%.
> 
> One of the targets was to avoid the spoiler problem. I think 
> in this method a small party could reduce the votes of the 
> otherwise largest party so that it loses its "55% position".
> 
> > 
> > Assuming you are suggesting this in the context of electing an 
> > assembly (national or regional parliament) and not a single-winner 
> > election (state governor or president)
> 
> I talked about single winners in the sense that one party 
> will rule. This could mean electing one single president, 
> electing the only representative of a single-winner district, 
> or electing an assembly so that it would clearly delegate 
> power to one of the large parties (as in the 55% rule).
> 
> > , it is very interesting to note what happened in Malta after STV-PR 
> > was introduced some 80 years ago.  Before STV-PR was introduced AND 
> > for the first 40 years of its use, candidates from three, four or five 
> > parties were elected to the Parliament at each election, but for the 
> > past 40 years only two parties have been represented in the 
> > Parliament.  If you believe at all in representative democracy I think 
> > it is much the best to leave that aspect of party dynamics to the 
> > voters.
> 
> I do believe in representative democracy where each section 
> of the voters if properly represented in the system. The 
> voters might be split in two or more sections, or i no clear 
> sections at all (if e.g. the representation is strongly 
> individual based, not party based).
> 
> On the other hand a two-party system could be considered a 
> valid form of democracy too. In the challenge I tried to seek 
> new approaches to implementing two-aprty systems. One could 
> characterize two-party systems so that the intention is that 
> the dividing line between the two parties represents the 
> median voter. The two parties are expected to change their 
> opinions in time so that the median point can be found 
> (otherwise the opposition party will remain in opposition for 
> a long time). The most common methods, plurality with 
> single-winner districts and plurality to elect a single 
> winner (e.g. a president) tend to have some problems like the 
> spoiler problem. The question is then if one could improve 
> the current two-party systems so that they would work better 
> as intended.
> 
> In my definition I took the position that in a two-party 
> system we don't allow small parties to rule until they have 
> grown bigger. An alternative approach would be to allow also 
> small compromise candidates to win. That would be ok as well, 
> but this time I wanted to focus on very pure two-party 
> systems where the target is strictly to allow only two 
> parties to rule (with the exception that they may lose their 
> large party status one day). One philosophical argument 
> behind this approach is that if we have single-party 
> governments it is good that those parties represent a large 
> section of the population instead of being just less bad than 
> the candidate of the competing party. The society is intended 
> to reach its balance by alternating those two leading 
> parties, so compromise candidates are not necessarily needed 
> to achieve the balance.
> 
> I must say that I personally lean more in the direction of 
> multi-party systems. But one need not see two-party systems 
> just as failed attempts to implement multi-party systems, or 
> as otherwise failed attempts to implement democracy. One can 
> see them as well as intentionally chosen forms of democracy 
> where the alternating two parties have been chosen as the 
> preferred way to rule the society. If that is the case, all 
> we need to do is to eliminate the current problems from the 
> election methods (and the whole system), and the system works 
> better than ever.
> 
> We may decide that this better working society will or will 
> not allow also third parties to rule. Maybe we would need 
> also another challenge to find best approaches to improve 
> two-party systems so that they would allow also third parties 
> to rule, but still not become multi-party systems.)
> 
> Juho