[EM] Proportional parliamentary and government elections with proxies

[Andy Jennings]

I found this paper by James Green-Armytage very interesting:
http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~armytage/proxy2010.pdf

He doesn't cover all of the issues you mention, but it's a good start.



On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 2:27 PM, Peter Zbornik <pzbornik at gmail.com> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> has a direct proportional election system with proxies been considered
> before?
>
> Each voter is granted a vote in parliament, either personally or through a
> proxy (as in stock companies). The voter could change his representative in
> parliamet when she/he likes (or at a specific date to avoid identification
> of the voter). The voter could have several representatives, each of them a
> specialist in a different issue (health care, tax, education, business and
> so on), or split his vote on several representatives in each area. There
> would be no elections, just a continuous switching of proxies. The
> representative of the voter would not know who supports him/her to avoid
> coercion.
>
> The voter who chose to represent himself would have the right to speak and
> be present "virtually" or (less practical) physically in the parliament and
> to vote on all issues and so on. For the time being I would like to put
> aside such practical details, like how a milion parlamentarian would vote
> and so on. Such problems can be solved through remote voting or similar.
>
> The government could (but need not) be formed through proportional
> elections by the citizens too.
> Each voter would vote for each department, i.e., if there were 10
> ministries, then the voter would cast a ranked ballot for each of the 10
> ministries.
> Some weights could be applied, i.e. if the voter could only care for one
> ministry instead of all 10, then he could put all of his votes on this
> ministry and none for the others.
> In addition to this, each ministry could be weighted according to the share
> of the public budget it uses.
> I.e some ministries would take more of the vote than others. I.e. if one
> ministry has half the budget, then a "standard" vote for this would require
> half of the votes the voter has (i.e. 5 votes in the case of 10 ministries).
> I.e. the voter has a constant number of votes (say V votes), each vote for
> a specific seat "costs" A1,...,AS, where S is the number of ministries, and
> A1+...+AS=V. A vote for ministry s, 1>=s>=S, would be normalised by the
> "cost", i.e. if the voter would like to vote only for one minstry s, then he
> would get V/As votes.
> Furthermore, the voter would need to specify the rank-order of the
> ministries themselves, so that all of the vote is used, even if the minister
> in the "favorite minstry" becomes someone else than the candidates preferred
> by the voter or if the preferred candidate is elected but the vote is not
> fully exhausted.
> The elections would then proceed as a normal STV election.
> This got a bit complicated, I will provide a simple example upon request.
>
> An election system as described above would blur the difference between
> proportional representation and direct democracy and allow for direct
> elections of a government.
>
> A question I am not sure of, is how the approach above should be applied
> for budget allocation for each ministry, i.e. how big part of the cake each
> ministry should get. I guess each voter could make his budget allocation
> between the ministries, and the resulting budget would be the arithmetic
> mean of the submitted allocations. I guess there are better or more
> sophisticated systems for optimal budget allocation.
>
> Does anyone on this list have more information on similar methods to the
> ones described above?
> I guess such methods have been discussed on this list before.
> A recommended book or paper or a reference to previous posts on this list
> would be appreciated.
>
> Best regards
> Peter Zborník
>
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>
>
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