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

[Jameson Quinn]

2011/10/31 David L Wetzell <wetzelld at gmail.com>

> 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.
>

My point was: many politically-active people quickly filter new ideas by
partisan advantage. This can be as blunt as "If it hurts my party, I oppose
it" or as sophisticated as "If it helps the party of the person who is
proposing it, then that must be their primary motivation." Since PR, unlike
single-winner reform, has highly predictable partisan results in the short
term, fewer people have the open mind to listen to you talk about it.


> 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.
>

This is a good non-partisan goal. Both PR and single-winner reform would
help here. It is easier to convince people that this is your sincere goal
when talking about single-winner reform, for the reasons above.


> 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.
>

Yes, it is important to stay grounded in reality, and not get caught up in
improbable scenarios; something which, you're right, is more of a danger
when talking about single-winner reform.

Anyway, I think we probably already agree more than it would sound like, in
that activism should be balanced between PR and single-winner advocacy, and
not too focused on just one side of that.

Jameson
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