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

[David L Wetzell]

On Mon, Oct 31, 2011 at 11:58 AM, Jameson Quinn <jameson.quinn at gmail.com>wrote:

> The reason PR makes you sound more like a whiny loser than single-winner
> reform is that PR is essentially a results-oriented idea. If you say you
> want PR, people know that you mean you want different winners, and they can
> easily check who that would be in practice. And that makes it easy for them
> to pigeonhole you.


dlw: all election rules are results oriented ideas.  Some pragmatists
believe that the essence of all ideas are their results.

PR(or quasi-PR) promotes pluralism.  Single-seated elections promote
hierarchy.  Both are needed in politics.  But hierarchy is more important
in the "less local" elections.  It is in "More local" elections that it's
important to give the ethnic/economic/ideological minorities more voice.
 O.W., the tyranny of the majority leads to a tyranny of the select
minority due to how voter interest in elections is endogenous to whether
they are competitive.

>
> Single-winner reform lets you talk about process and deeper issues more
> easily, and because immediate results are harder to predict exactly, it's
> harder to pigeonhole and easier to keep the focus on longer-term results.
>

I don't think it gets a lot deeper than the need to compromise or blend
together the values promoted by PR and Single winner elections.  A lot of
times, the purportedly deeper issues can be deceptive, because they are
relatively abstract and hard to connect to reality.  The truth is GIGO.  If
political candidates/parties are inherently fuzzy options then many of the
funky things you can do to rank or what-not among those options are less
meaningful or helpful than purported.

>
> I think we agree on the deeper goals, I'm just saying that it would be a
> mistake to stop talking about both PR and single-winner reform, even if you
> think PR is more important.
>

Well, I believe that making more "more local" elections more competitive
and thereby more meaningful checks on $peech is something that would appeal
to the different factions of the #OWS a lot more than stuff on
single-winner reform.
The latter is too esoteric and let's face it, a lot of it is chasing each
other's tails, as it's too easy to tease out something that might be
(mis)construed as a deal-killer in any election rule.

dlw

>
> JQ
>
> 2011/10/31 David L Wetzell <wetzelld at gmail.com>
>
>>
>> Also, it is very easy to sound like a whiny loser when talking about PR
>>> (either a third-party loser or local-minority-party loser). So there's no
>>> way single-winner issues should be put on the back burner. We can walk and
>>> chew gum here. (Gum on back burner ... eewww)
>>> Jameson:Also, it is very easy to sound like a whiny loser when talking
>>> about PR (either a third-party loser or local-minority-party loser). So
>>> there's no way single-winner issues should be put on the back burner. We
>>> can walk and chew gum here. (Gum on back burner ... eewww)
>>>
>>>
>>> dlw: once again, if we frame it as solving a problem then it's not a
>> matter of whining.
>> 3-5 seat forms of PR or quasi-PR are very much needed for "more local"
>> elections that otherwise tend to be rarely competitive due to de facto
>> segregation.
>>
>> This is not about getting third party candidates elected, it's about
>> making our polity tend towards a contested(and far more dynamic) political
>> duopoly, rather than a (somewhat contested) political monopoly.
>>
>> dlw
>>
>>
>
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