[EM] Response to Kristofer Musterhjelm

[David L Wetzell]

>
>
>> dlw: IRV3 hardly changes nothing.  It doesn't by itself change the
>> tendency for there to be two major parties, but I take issue with the view
>> that that has to be changed.
>> In my explanation of Strategic Election Reform, I outline my vision of a
>> contested duopoly with 2 major parties, an indefinite number of minor
>> parties trying to replace one of the two major parties or for one of them
>> to merge with them on their terms, and a large numer of LTPs, Local Third
>> Parties who specialize in contesting "more local" elections and who vote
>> strategically together in "less local" elections as a part of their wider
>> practice of the politics of Gandhi, as I believe will emanate from the #OWS
>> led political cultural changes.
>>
>> So IRV3 gives dissenters more exit threat and voice in elections and it
>> makes both of the two major parties reposition themselves closer to the
>> true political center (a moving target) more often.
>> What's not enough is IRV3 alone, but that's not what FairVote is pushiing.
>>
>
> KM:That doesn't seem to be what IRV actually causes, though. In Australia,
> the Senate's pretty much Labour plus National-Liberal coalition and has
> been so for a long time. If IRV with AV (or STV) accelerates the change of
> major parties, Australia doesn't show it.


dlw: My reasoning is based on the US system, which tends to tilt (too much
right now) to effective single party rule due to the fact we don't use PR
as much.  This gives the other major party incentives to act like a
conjoined (fraternal) twin, following the other party who's got more
momentum.   We also don't have compulsory voting, and so if a third party
candidate gets more attention and starts talking smack about a major party,
it can do more harm, as evidenced by the effects of a low Democratic
turnout in 2010.

>
>
>>>  dlw:My dissent from Duverger's law is that I think it's the Economies
>> of scale in winning single-seat elections that leads to fewer "major
>> parties" and that this tends to be true with almost all single seat
>> elections.  Why, because rational choice theory for politics is not very
>> realistic.  We do, as a matter of fact, act not unlike sheep a good deal of
>> the time, especially when it comes to politics.  As a result, marketing
>> matters in the (re)formation of preferences and there are economies of
>> scale in marketing, or reshaping the preferences of enough people to win a
>> big single-seat elections, thereby leading to major parties.
>>
>
> KM:Duverger's law has another part, too, namely that the "double ballot
> majority system" (FPTP runoffs) and proportional representation each lead
> to multiple parties. While France's minor parties more or less have  to be
> in coalition with one of the major parties, they are there, have a
>  presence in the assembly, and those that have, are more numerous in
> Australia.
>
> Therefore, I don't think it's clear that every single-winner method is
> doomed to lead the nation to a party duopoly.
>

dlw: A two stage election has a winner-doesn't-take-all first stage and a
winner-take-all second stage.  So it's still consistent with single-winner
leading to hierarchy and multi-winner leading to plurality.

And could we not argue that the difference between two major parties and
two coalitions of parties isn't as great as we may think it is?

I think the US's system has been getting worse in the last 40 years for 3
interrelated reasons:
1. Increased aggressiveness of $peech and the difficulty in trusting the
two major parties/foxes to enact Campaign Finance Reforms/Guard the Hen
House.
2. Prominence of the Cultural Wars Wedge Issues and the lack of incentives
for either of the two major party's leaders to effectively reframe them.
 This, combined with number one, has crowded out too many other issues from
our elections and discouraged too many of us from voting/participating.
3. The way our system tilts too easily to effective single party rule at
the state/nat'l level has cut down on the number of competitive elections
and exacerbated the conflict between the two major parties so that it's
harder for them to get things done together.

thus, I don't think it requires the end of a two-party system to restore
the US's democracy.  If we have a contested duopoly and a host of
LTPs(local thid parties who specialize in contesting "More local" elections
and vote strategically together in "less local" elections as part of their
more general issue-advocacy) checking the influence of $peech, it'd suffice.

dlw:Aye, and that's not per se a bad thing.
>> There's a thing in the social sciences called, "the problem of order <
>> http://scholar.google.com/**scholar?hl=en&q=%22problem+of+**
>> order%22+spengler&gs_sm=e&gs_**upl=**14759l16228l2l16537l8l7l1l0l0l**
>> 0l328l1552l0.2.4.1l8l0&bav=on.**2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp<http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22problem+of+order%22+spengler&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=14759l16228l2l16537l8l7l1l0l0l0l328l1552l0.2.4.1l8l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp>
>> .,cf.osb&**biw=1366&bih=631&um=1&ie=UTF-**8&sa=N&tab=ws>".  "The art of
>> progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid
>> order. "  We need both hierarchy and equality and change and continuity in
>> working out the rules that govern us all, and this is possible with a
>> contested duopoly in our political systems.
>>
>
> KM:It is also possible with multiple parties. PR-only nations have shown
> as much - they don't seem to crash and burn even though they have multiple
>  viable parties. In my country, Norway, the effective number of political
> parties is between four and five. In reality, there are more, but some  of
> them are smaller than the others, and the ENPP formula adjusts for  this.
> In Sweden, it's much the same thing, and neither of these  countries seem
> to be falling into the chaos of too much change.
>

dlw: too much pluralism can make it hard to make needed changes.  You need
leadership to make changes.  If the ruling coalition shifts often then it's
hard to follow through with changes.

>
> KM:If anything, I would say that the party political system here (which is
> more fluid than the one in the US) is still quite hierarchical, and that
> one could go to a system without parties (like demarchy or Gohlke's
> Practical Democracy) without losing order amid change.


dlw: I think it's okay for both major parties to be hierarchical, to have
intra-party discipline, so long as neither can dominate the other and there
are other meaningful options available for voters.
I think we can trust in the politics of Gandhi/MLKjr (and hopefully #OWS)
more so for the crucial sorts of changes needed.

>
>
>>
>>  And very likely any other single-seated election...
>> It's costly to run an effective multi-seat US Presidential election.
>>  This does not deny third parties a constructive role in our political
>> system, however.
>>
>
> See my response regarding runoffs. Abd also claims that runoffs more often
> overturn the Plurality ("first round") winner than does IRV.
>

dlw: I'm in favor of a three-stage election for the
president<http://anewkindofparty.blogspot.com/2011/02/why-electoral-college-should-be.html>.
 I think we could have the first stage could follow the current state
primaries(opened to all voters) to determine 6/7 of the 7 finalists, the
second stage could have everyone pick their favorite 3 of the 7 finalists
so as to choose which 3 of them would go to the third stage at the
Electoral College.  At the electoral college, three electors from each of
the 435 congressional districts in the US would determine the next
president of the US.

This would elect a president with broad appeal who will then be sheltered
from the partisan rivalry for control of the Senate or House of
Representatives.

>
>>
>> dlw:I'm familiar with AV and SV.  I've dialogued on these matters at
>> length with Dale Sheldon Hess and Clay/Broken Ladder at my blog.    <
>> http://anewkindofparty.**blogspot.com/2010/07/**
>> strategic-election-reform-vs-**approval.html<http://anewkindofparty.blogspot.com/2010/07/strategic-election-reform-vs-approval.html>
>> >
>>
>> AV and SV are not as great when you relax the assumption of cardinal
>> utility preferences over politicians among voters.  As I stated above, I
>> like using a limited form of AV to reduce the number of candidates in IRV3
>> to three.  You'd agree that IRV works far better with 3 than very many
>> candidates?
>>
>
> I think ranked voting is better than AV and SV because of strategy issues
> with the former, so I can't really reply to that. However, some cardinal
> methods resist strategy better than others. Perhaps you would be interested
> in investigating Majority Judgement or the other median rating based
> methods? Since the median has a high breakdown point, exaggerated ratings
> by minorities will affect the outcome less than it will affect Approval or
> Range/Score.
>

dlw: I have read about majority judgement.  I think it's very good for a
country that has a strong cultural agreements about what is to be expected
for their leaders.  And so I'd have no problem with its use in France or
Scandinavia.

>
> KM:As for IRV, I don't know. IRV3 still can exhibit nonmonotonicity,
> Condorcet failure, reversal non-symmetry, etc.

The "viable third party" problem that makes it risky to do IRV in certain
> situations like Burlington also shows up even with only three candidates -
> if those three are from different parties. If the third party candidate is
> weak, IRV is essentially spoiler-free, but if the third party candidate
> grows stronger, the order of eliminations can switch to one that elects the
> second best winner instead of the best, and where voting for the best
> candidate only moves the method further into not-best territory. It doesn't
> have to be like this.
>

dlw: I think more practically that IRV3/AV3(uses a limited form of AV to
get three finalists) enforces the maintenance of a two-party dominated
system.   It also tends to be somewhat incumbent friendly.  This makes it
easier for it to get adopted by legislators, who mostly are going to be
incumbents.

Most of the features mentioned above may happen, but they don't happen that
often and their practical consequences aren't that great when we consider
that parties can and do change(for worse or better) and that the best way
to change things is to move the center via the politics of
Gandhi/MLKjr/#OWS.

>
> KM:You can see this for yourself by tinkering with Ka-Ping Yee's 1D
> Gaussian visualization. If you use three candidates and have two of them
> far away from the middle, IRV acts like you would expect. Move the red and
> yellow closer to the middle green, though, and on the IRV line, an island
> of yellow suddenly appears. Tinker further and the island has both yellow
> and red on it. I've attached an example of this.


dlw: I've seen that before.  Like I said, if the center is dynamic and so
are the two biggest party, it's not that big of a deal...

>
>>
>> dlw: The real issue with Electoral Reform is a marketing problem, not an
>> analytical problem.  FairVote is great at marketing.  Most electoral reform
>> experts, including myself, aren't.  And, as I stated before, given the fact
>> that we are in a FPTP-dominated political system, there can only be one
>> alternative to FPTP at a time locally.  I don't have a problem with that
>> alternative being IRV.  It doesn't bother me if IRV isn't self-evidently
>> the best election rule from an analytical standpoint.
>>
>
> This, to me, feels a bit like the national football (soccer) rules said
> that all games should be played on a 40% incline, with those who have
> gathered the most goals in previous matches at the top and the other team
> at the bottom. Then some marketers come and say that this is obviously
> unfair and we should play on a 20% incline instead, and they build up a
> large organization to promote this.
>
> At some point, someone scratches their heads and say: hey, why do we have
> to have any incline at all? Can't we be even more fair and play on a flat
> field, so that the previously-winning team (major party) doesn't have an
> undue advantage?
>
> Sure, a 20% grade is more fair than 40%, but we can still do better. A 20%
> grade (IRV) might still not be enough to give points (victories) to worthy
> challengers, and it might sour the people on reducing the grade to zero
> because "we tried that and it didn't change anything".
>

dlw: It's easy  for you to say we need to push for a completely level
playing field, but it's damn hard to get anywhere in a two-party dominated
system that's tilting strongly towards becoming single-party dominated.
Politics is the art of the possible.  If we make our system into a
contested duopoly, it'll go a long ways, especially if we can strongly
lower the political acrimony caused by the desires of both major parties to
get a permanent majority.

I'd hardly say IRV didn't change anything..., the kicker is to pair it with
the use of PR, which is FairVote's position.   If neither of the two major
parties can dominate then it'd be easier to play them off of each other or
to get them both to reposition onto a new political center via major
political cultural changes.

>
> It is true that the flat-fielders have been disorganized, and that's
> unfortunate, because it diminishes the chance that we will get a level
> field. May the declaration help in this respect, so that we don't have to
> settle with "only somewhat less unfair than FPTP".
>

dlw:What we need most is electoral pluralism.  We needed that
decades/centuries ago.  We had more electoral pluralism in ther US in the
past (like with the 3-seat cumulative voting in IL from 1870-1980).  I
believe FairVote can market critical reforms to the US population.  I can't
say the same thing for folks pitching other alternative election rules and
given that our system uses primarily FPTP right now in the US, we can't
afford lots of alternatives being on the market.  It's too easy for those
who benefit from the status quo to divide and conquer us.

dlw
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