[EM] Response to Kristofer Musterhjelm

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

David L Wetzell wrote:
> 
>>>         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.  

Your first points seem to suggest that if you had PR, the problem of IRV 
leading to two-party rule (or 2.5-party rule, as I call it, since the 
NatLibs aren't one party) would be ameliorated. But Australia has PR - 
STV, to be precise - for the elections for its other house, and still 
that doesn't break the 2.5-party rule of the Senate.

You might argue that Australia only has half PR (i.e. in one of its 
chambers) whereas you'd want the US to have PR for its legislature and 
IRV for executive elections such as Governor and President. Thus, it 
would make more sense to compare with a nation that elects a President 
by IRV and has PR everywhere else. Yet Ireland, which has an STV 
legislature and an IRV president, doesn't show a good record of that 
breaking two-party rule (fixed two-party rule, even) for the positions 
that *are* elected by IRV.

Ireland doesn't have compulsory voting, yet the President has been 
elected from the same party almost every time. There have been two 
exceptions: the first, before the setup of parties, and then a Labour 
victory recently.

Unfortunately, it's hard to find further examples of IRV going in either 
direction - simply because IRV is not widely used. What I *can* find on 
a national level is Malta (which is somewhat of a special case because 
it's two-party even where STV is used) and Fiji (which is no longer a 
democracy, to my knowledge).

>>     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.

I'd still consider it single-winner, since at the end of the day, a 
*single* winner is elected to each district. I can be flexible here, 
though. The top-two article on Wikipedia mentions that top-two runoff is 
a game (in the game-theory sense) because the voters can adjust their 
votes from one round to another.

In any case, if the runoff method leads to plurality, why not use it? It 
clearly doesn't produce paralyzing Plurality - France tried PR and then 
returned to top-two as they considered PR to fragment too much, which 
implies that top-two didn't. Furthermore, runoffs have seen wider use 
than IRV, including in the US, and so practical cases can be used to 
argue for it; and it seems to overturn Plurality more often than IRV 
does. FairVote claims that IRV is cheaper than top-two, but others 
disagree. Warren argues that IRV needs more complex voting machines, and 
that this and the fact that IRV can't be precinct-summable could erase 
most of the gains from not having a runoff.

> 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?  

The greatest difference, to my mind, is that having coalitions brings 
politics out in the open. Anybody may read the record of the parliament 
or legislature, and alliances between what would be the wings of the two 
parties are very clear, particularly in parliamentary systems where the 
continued existence of the executive rests on the coalitions remaining 
as they are.

Beyond this, coalitions also give a greater flexibility. To give an 
example of this: in Norway, lately the christian democratic party has 
made statements to the fact that they would ally with the right-leaning 
parties rather than the left-leaning ones, but only if the populist 
rightmost party isn't too strong in the remaining coalition. The 
Christian party has conservative and liberal shades of Christians in it, 
and this is probably an internal compromise. As such, it keeps the right 
bloc from veering too far to the right.
If we'd had a two-party system, all of this would have happened under 
the covers, out of sight. You could argue that the right-populist party 
wouldn't have had a chance at all and so the outcome would be the same, 
but the right-populists' voters know why they have less of a say now 
than if everything was done internally. These voters can also consider 
whether they need the Christian democratic party at all, and the 
conservative voters of the CDP can consider if they should vote further 
to the right.

So, in simple words about the above: having multiple parties lets the 
voters decide more about how politics is made. Since coalitions are 
fluid, they are ultimately responsible to the voters.

> 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. 

I don't disagree with that...

> 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.

.. but it seems like it's just the effects of a steady erosion. You had 
something a bit like social democracy with FDR. If you'd had a viable 
multiparty system, I think that system itself would have given support 
to that position, as well as countered the later departure towards one 
guided increasingly by money.

Maybe you'd like to have something similar with your contested duopoly 
concept. If so, where we differ is in how much leveling we think is 
necessary to guard against the kind of deterioration that has been going 
on. A truly contested duopoly will be quite difficult to achieve, I 
think. By analogy from oligopolies of the business world, if power is 
concentrated in a few organizations, then these can use that power to 
raise barriers to entry that seriously impede progress - in the business 
realm, keeping the producer surplus high even at the cost of deadweight 
loss, and in the political realm, leaving people unrepresented and 
moving the course of the nation away from that which society wanted.

>>>    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.

True. I'm not sure what makes PR work less well in some countries, but I 
think it's got to do with political history. Where the political process 
is seen as something to game to the maximum extent, the outcomes seem to 
be more volatile - I'm thinking about the gaming of the additional 
member system in Italy with decoy lists in particular.

Perhaps this is akin to the extent to which one would expect strategic 
behavior to appear in single-winner elections.

Instability can also occur in places that are transitioning to a 
democratic form of government. Early post-Soviet Poland and Hungary are 
good examples. I think they settled down, though.

>>     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.

Alright. This is more of a "it would be nice" than a "this is wrong as
it is" thing for me, so no problem :-)

> I think we can trust in the politics of Gandhi/MLKjr (and hopefully 
> #OWS) more so for the crucial sorts of changes needed.

Should we? Movements like Gandhi's, MLK Jr.'s, and Occupy Wall Street
are "release valves". When conditions get too bad for the groups in
question, change forces its way through. Nations that are less
democratic get their own release valves, too, which fire less often but
more fiercely. If they are blocked altogether, say by a secret police,
the "vessel" eventually bursts in a revolution.

So it seems here that you have a continuum. On the one extreme, desires 
for change are picked up and made part of the political course. On the 
other, the dissatisfaction keeps building up until there's an explosion.
Now, the US is a democracy, so I don't think there will be a 
revolutionary explosion, but the movements suggest that those that are 
part of it don't get their say in the ordinary political process. This 
means that there's been a significant period of time in which they've 
considered the situation quite bad - enough for the metaphorical 
pressure to build up. Wouldn't it be better for the system to adjust 
itself earlier? That is better for the people - because they get a world 
closer to the one they want sooner - and it's better for the system, 
which doesn't exhibit as sudden and drastic changes.

(I'll note that the metaphor isn't perfect: countries that are very very 
good at using isolation and secret police can last for a long time. 
Consider North Korea. Also, it's a frequent objection from certain 
directions that bread and circuses can keep this force-change-through 
release of pressure simply by alleviating the pressure in other, more 
fleeting, ways.)

>>>    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.

If that's what you want, I don't think you need a single-winner method 
at all. Either have party primaries or use a method like STV in a grand 
jungle primary, in either case narrowing the field to 6 or 7 candidates. 
Then use a PR method (probably the same as in the first stage, if that's 
what you'll use) to narrow it down further to three. Finally, have the 
electoral college decide. Since the college itself is small, it doesn't 
need a voting method - it can just reach a decision in the same way that 
the House or Senate does.

If you use a non-PR method, you run the risk of teaming. Say that the 
Republicans decide to game the system. They therefore create shadow 
parties and hold primaries within them, so that the field includes 3 
Republican candidates (even if they are not formally Republican). Then 
if 51% of the voters are Republican, the party instructs them to rank 
all the R candidates first, and the method passes mutual majority (which 
it should to be any good), the three remaining candidates will all be 
Republicans, and it doesn't matter what the college does.

This strategy would be a kind of decoy list strategy, in that the party 
that wishes to game the system makes "shadow parties" (instead of shadow 
or decoy lists) to get around limits that are enforced per party.

Top-two runoff doesn't have this problem because you can't vote for all 
the clones at once - you have to pick one of them. Therefore, running 
clones harms you, it doesn't benefit you.

>>    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.   

As Jameson said, what you need is not an agreement of what is to be 
expected as much as an agreement of what constitutes an A-grade (or B, 
or F). If they don't, I think you get results like Bucklin voting would 
give, although I am not certain of this.

>>     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.  

It is possible to do a reform if the people wants it, even if the 
legislators do not. An example I like to point at for this is the 
adoption of STV in New York. It might even fit better with your idea of 
"politics by movement", since the proportional representation league (I 
don't remember its exact name at this time) was involved in promoting it.

(Later, said league suffered setbacks as those in power linked PR to 
"Stalin Frankenstein" and called STV a Soviet invention - and STV was 
eventually removed. Such tricks, needless to say, would not be feasible 
now: the USSR is dead.)

> 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.

See my earlier reply regarding "politics by movement". Movements build 
up momentum from dissatisfaction. A good political system should notice 
and adjust before it becomes necessary to adjust outside of it.

>>    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... 

At the moment of the election, the center is static, though. I'll reply 
to this in greater detail in the other post, but to be simple about it: 
all dynamic centers give you is a capacity for the parties to 
compensate. But that will discourage parties from forming where they 
could cover most voters, because it's at just this point where the weird 
effects occur.

>>    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. 

The question boils down to whether IRV (or IRV plus PR) is good enough 
to give meaningful political diversity, more precisely in the form of 
the major parties changing. It isn't in Australia. You could say that's 
because there's compulsory voting and how-to-vote cards in Australia, 
and then I could point at Ireland, and then you could say that the 
President there is ceremonial so the parties' hearts aren't in it. At 
some point, though, I run out of nations that use IRV. It could be the 
case that the few countries who did try IRV got two-party (or 
two-and-a-half-party) domination for different reasons, but it could 
also be the case that they did it for the same reason -- IRV.

Then one has to ask, do we risk it? That depends on the expected 
benefits of getting IRV, weighted by the chance of actually getting it 
(by whatever means most likely), versus the expected benefits of a given 
other method like Condorcet weighted by the chance of actually getting 
that.

I look at Australia and at Burlington, and to me, the former doesn't 
speak very well of the benefits of getting IRV vs Plurality (you might 
compare parliamentary IRV-Australia to parliamentary FPTP-Britain here); 
and the latter doesn't speak very well of the chances of getting it 
*and* retaining it. In Burlington, IRV was left alone when it elected 
the CW, as it did in the first election, but then it failed to elect the 
candidate that was the CW and would have won under almost every other 
method considered, and the repeal followed.

>     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.

I agree with the need for pluralism, and so I would support proportional 
representation without a thought. A 90% incumbency rate is pretty 
appalling for a legislature.

Linking the proportional representation method to IRV, however... that's 
another matter. FairVote's strategy seems to be that the people would 
see the better results of IRV and so also support STV - but if the 
"better" results of IRV end up causing backslides over costs (from 
having to remake voting machines), lack of transparency (due to no 
summability), and weird results - then that could hurt STV too.

You are right that we have been divided. I hope the declaration helps. 
Whether it does, time will tell, but it might, particularly if 
authorities within the field sign it.