[EM] PR >> Best Single-Winner Method > FPTP

[Stéphane Rouillon]

  M. Munsterhjelm,

I think that STV is actually the best "product on the market"
when we look at multiple-winner systems. But the number of seats per
super-districts has a huge influence over the quality
of the results and the quality of the debates.
A small number of seats per super-district harms the proportional 
representation.
A high number of seats per super-districts harms the democratic process, 
at least
because of the difficulty to obtain fair debates between a huge number 
of candidates.

Thus, I designed a sampling technique to obtain results "equivalent"
to a unique huge STV district without the problem of the explosion
of the number of candidates. The name of the method is SPPA (french 
acronym).
It creates similar districts to represent the population based on the 
date of birth of the elector
(day and month but not year). Every party thus presents a unique 
candidate per astrological district.
But results can be compared for an identical party between different 
districts to obtain an open list.
For a summary or more details:
http://citation.allacademic.com/meta/p_mla_apa_research_citation/1/9/9/3/9/p199397_index.html

On 2011-09-24 11:07, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
> Toby Pereira wrote:
>> Most of the discusssion on this group is about single-winner methods 
>> and while it's important to get things right for elections with 
>> single winners, I don't think I can be alone in thinking that with 
>> parliamentary elections, the gap (in quality) between any half-decent 
>> PR method and the "best possible" single-winner method would be 
>> greater than the gap between the best possible single-winner method 
>> and FPTP. I don't know so much about in America or other places (in 
>> terms of how realistic it is), but I certainly think that in the UK, 
>> that is where we should be concentrating. I don't think it's 
>> particularly realistic in the UK anyway, but I think we're probably 
>> more likely to get some form of PR than any of 
>> Approval/Range/Condorcet/Majority Judgement - and not forgetting SODA.
>
> I'll generally agree on this. Collective bodies, like parliaments, 
> houses, senates, and so on, have the property that their individual 
> members can check each other if picked properly. Thus, I'm inclined to 
> think that such bodies will be much less prone to going corrupt than 
> will single-winner positions (executives chosen by the people, etc). 
> However, the body has to be picked in a representative manner, or the 
> corruption can simply be arranged behind the scenes. See, for 
> instance, the New York history prior to and under STV.
>
> If switching to PR has the potential for greater improvement than 
> switching to a good single-winner system (away from Plurality), that 
> is good news for us -- because the most well known reform types for PR 
> (party list, STV) actually work. PR countries are multiparty ones 
> (with a few exceptions). The most well known single-winner reform, 
> however, (IRV,) does not have that kind of track record. Australia has 
> a PR house and a single-winner IRV house, and the Duvergerian effect 
> of the latter seems stronger than the anti-Duvergerian effect of the 
> former, since (to my knowledge) they have a two-and-a-half party 
> system there.
>
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