[EM] Proportional, Accountable, Local (PAL) representation: isn't this a big deal?

[Juho Laatu]

On 29.10.2011, at 16.58, James Gilmour wrote:

> Kristofer Munsterhjelm  > Sent: Saturday, October 29, 2011 9:14 AM
>> STV is not mixed member proportional. As for the complexity issue, STV 
>> seems to work where it has been implemented. I agree that complexity 
>> will put a bound on how large each district can be, but as long as you 
>> keep below that size, it should work.
>> 
>> If you have a district size of 5 members and 10 parties, that would give 
>> a seemingly unmanagable number of 50 candidates.
> 
> I think that is most unlikely.  The only party that would likely nominate five candidates would be one that had reason to believe it
> could win at least four of the five seats in the multi-member district.  Parties that might have an expectation of winning two seats
> would likely nominate only three candidates.  Parties that expected to win only one seat would nominate at most two candidates, and
> based on our experience here in Scotland, many would nominate only one.
> 
> So the total number of candidates in a 5-member district would almost certainly be far short of 50    I think a total of 20 would be
> much more likely.

Here's some data from last parliamentary elections in Finland.

The largest multi-member district had 35 representatives and 405 candidates. All the large parties had 35 candidates. The largest party got 11 representatives.

The two smallest multi-member districts had 6 representatives and 94 or 108 candidates.

One of the parties grew from 5 representatives to 39 representatives. So it needed lots of candidates too in order to not run out of candidates in some districts.

(see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_parliamentary_election,_2011)

If one has only one or two candidates more than the number of representatives that this party has or expects to get, then the decision on who will be elected will be mainly made by the party and not by the voters. Preliminaries could help a bit by allowing at least the party members to influence.

If proportional results are counted separately at each district, then it would be good to have a large number of representatives per district to achieve accurate proportionality. In order to allow the voters to decide who will be elected there should be maybe twice as many candidates per each party as that party will get representatives. In that way no seats are "safe".

It is also good if there are such candidates that are not likely to be elected this time but that may gain popularity in these elections and become elected in the next elections. All this sums up to quite a large number of candidates.

My favourite approach to implementing ranked style voting in this kind of environments would be to combine party affiliation and rankings somehow. The idea is that even a bullet vote or a short ranked vote would be counted for the party by default. If one looks this from the open list method point of view, this could mean just allowing the voter to rank few candidates instead of naming only one. Already ability to rank three candidates would make party internal proportionality in open list methods much better. Probably there is typically no very widespread need to rank candidates of different parties in this kind of elections, but it ok to support also this if the method and the requirement of simplicity of voting do allow that. From STV point of view the problem is how to allow better proportionality and voter decisions instead of party decisions in some nice way.

Juho



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