[EM] Interactive Representation

[Juho Laatu]

On 6.11.2011, at 21.59, capologist wrote:

> Juno wrote:
> 
>> Since you are building this on the single-seat district tradition, three or four seats and 10 candidates is plenty. I'm used to numbers like 6 seats with 108 candidates, and 35 seats with 405 candidates, and at least eight parties in the parliament. (In that situation even ranking all of the candidates, or even all of the candidates of one's favourite party may be too tedious. One may however allow all votes (also short ones) to be counted for the party.)
>> 
>> What would be a good (non-limiting) number of candidates? Maybe something like (P * K1) * (S * K2), where P = current number of parties with representatives, K1 = 1.5 or 2, S = number of seats, K2 = 1.
> 
> I don't think ballot access rules are essential to the method. The community can make it as open or as exclusive as it sees fit.

Yes, different societies have different needs and targets. For example a "two-party" country may intentionally limit the number of parties.

>  Note that the typical voter will not rank all candidates, but only his top few choices, either because he's confident that at least one of those few will be seated, or because there is no other candidate he'd want voting on his behalf in the legislature.
> 
> For number of seats, I think four is good.  At S=4, any voting block bigger than 20% is guaranteed a representative, and a much smaller block will usually suffice.  In America I believe the four most significant political "voices" would be conservative Christian, conservative libertarian, liberal, and centrist.

The two seat method seemed theoretically elegant to me since it pretty much kept the current two-party ideology while providing some interesting changes to it. Also high seat numbers with full proportionality were interesting (although more complex computationally). The four seat approach may be excellent for the USA right now from the point of view that there may be appropriate number of emerging parties right now to make use of those four seats. If a four seat solution would be chosen I'd expect more discussion after few years when some new smaller parties would start questioning the idea of limiting the number of parties (and size of minority with right to its own representative) to that level. Four seats is thus somewhere between a two-party system and full proportionality. No problem with that but in some sense four is just one possible number. Four seat systems may however work well, just like any other small numbers.

> 
> If the number of seats and candidates do get so large that the Schulze Method on the candidate sets becomes computationally difficult, I'm not married to that seating process. IRV-style successive elimination of candidates is good enough for government work.

Yes, STV could be a natural choice in that case.

Juho