[EM] hello from DLW of "A New Kind of Party":long time electoral reform enthusiast/iconoclast-wannabe...

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

David L Wetzell wrote:
> Hello Walabio, et al.
> 
> On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 4:41 AM, ⸘Ŭalabio‽ <Walabio at macosx.com 
> <mailto:Walabio at macosx.com>> wrote:
> 
>>      >       6.      I advocate for FairVote's IRV3.
>> 
>>            I hate to break this to you, But FairVote.Org is Astroturf.
>>      The Republicrats and Democans know that people want reform.  IRV
>>     (Instant Runoff-Voting) is a reform changing nothing.  We need to
>>     take a step back and look at Duverger’s Law:
> 
> 
> 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.

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.

>>            Duverger’s Law is an observation.  Let us suppose that we
>>     have more candidates on the left than right.  Let us also suppose
>>     that we use plurality (only vote for one candidate for each office).
>>      The candidates on the left will split the vote causing the 1 of the
>>     candidates on the right to win.  Over time, this causes only one
>>     party on the left and one party on the right to survive.  That is
>>     why we have republicrats and democans.
>> 
> 
> 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.

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.

>>            Now to IRV.
>> 
>>            With IRV, one ranks the candidates.  One eliminates
>>     candidates from the ballot.  In IRV, someone on the right may list
>>     Libertarian first, but just in case list Republican as third.
>>      Someone on the left might list Green as first, but list Democrat as
>>     third.
>> 
>>            People will disagree about who should be first or second,
>>     leading to eliminations to third place.  In third place, one only
>>     finds republicrats and democans.  Let us look at Australia as an
>>     example:
> 
>>            In Australia, one finds 2 houses.  1 house represents the
>>     political views of Australia and uses STV (Single Transferable
>>     Vote).  The other house represents the interests of districts.  It
>>     uses IRV.  In the STV-house, one finds lots of parties and
>>     independents.  In the IRV-house,  one finds only 2 parties with no
>>     independents and no third-parties.
> 
> 
> 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=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.  

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.

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.

>>            IRV occasional reverses whether the republicrat or democan
>>     wins but does not allow independents or third-parties to win:
>> 
>>            If we would have had IRV in 2000, Gore would have won, but in
>>     Presidential Election since 1856 no third-party or independent would
>>     have won under IRV.
> 
> 
> 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.

>>            Many competitive single-winner voting systems exists such as
>>     Condorcet, Score-Voting, Approval, et cetera.  My favorite is
>>     Approval because it is simple and runs on existing voting equipment:
>> 
>>            http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/Approval_voting
> 
> 
> 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>
> 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.

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.

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.

>>            I hope that you will be weary of the Astroturf of
>>     FairVote.Org now.  For a general feeling of the feelings of voting
>>     experts, you should read this position-paper:
>> 
>>          
>>      https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oyJLxI9dciXBbowM5mougnbGHzkL3Ue1QkD8nnMwWLg/edit?hl=en_US&pli=1
>>     <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oyJLxI9dciXBbowM5mougnbGHzkL3Ue1QkD8nnMwWLg/edit?hl=en_US&pli=1>
>> 
>>            The position-paper is a work in progress.
> 
> 
> 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".

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".
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