[EM] Re Rich Fobes, Kristofer M, James G

[David L Wetzell]

>
>
> From: Richard Fobes <ElectionMethods at VoteFair.org>
> To: election-methods at electorama.com
> Cc:
> Date: Sat, 18 Feb 2012 21:04:42 -0800
> Subject: Re: [EM] (Kevin Venzke) and Richard Fobes.
> David Wetzell, your reply reveals that we view the U.S. political system
> very differently.
>
> Here is a link to a "map" of the U.S. political system as I see it:
>
>    http://www.votefair.org/**pencil_metaphor.html<http://www.votefair.org/pencil_metaphor.html>
>
> "If the Republican party and the Democratic party are at opposite ends of
> a pencil, most of the voters are way above the pencil.  Both parties are
> pulled down away from the voters by the money coming from the biggest
> campaign contributors."
>
> Please see the illustration on that page for details.  (Of course it is
> simplified.)
>
> The main point is that the gap between the voters and the politicians is
> bigger than the smaller gap between the two main political parties.
>

dlw: We don't see the US that differently.  I'm focusing more on how the US
politics used to be.  Things have been going south for 4 decades now and
that's why it's become so dysfunctional.
If we intensified the things that used to be critically important for US
politics in the past then we could get a far more meritocratic two-party
system that would meet the needs of people.

> dlw
> Richard Fobes
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Richard Fobes <ElectionMethods at VoteFair.org>
> To: election-methods at electorama.com
> Cc:
> Date: Sat, 18 Feb 2012 21:18:39 -0800
> Subject: Re: [EM] STV vs Party-list PR, could context matter?
> On 2/18/2012 1:49 PM, Kevin Venzke wrote:
>
>> Hi Richard,
>>
>> *De :* Richard Fobes <ElectionMethods at VoteFair.org>
>>
> >
>
>> I do favor having more than two parties, but I don't see how three (or
>>> more) strong parties can be accommodated until after Congress and state
>>> legislatures use voting methods that are compatible with more than two
>>> parties.
>>>
>>
>> Do you have real world examples in mind here? Have you looked at
>> assemblies, to which no executive is responsible, that are elected by
>> party list or that
>> for some other reason have multiple parties?
>>
>
> I have in mind European parliaments where coalitions are typically needed.
>
> In my opinion, coalitions require back-room compromises that most voters
> would not like (if they knew what those compromises were).
>
> I have not seen any parliamentary democracies in which voters are able to
> elect problem-solving leaders.  Instead, special-interest puppets are
> elected.
>
> More specifically, European politicians seem to be as clueless as U.S.
> politicians about what is needed to "create jobs" and restore widespread
> economic prosperity.
>

dlw: This is why I advocate for the use of a "less-is-more" PR in "More
local" elections, rather than system-wide use of PR that nails
proportionality.

>
>  I have trouble imagining that this is a major issue. Congressional rules
>> based on the assumptions of there being two parties aren't in the U.S.
>> constitution.
>> They can be changed. But they definitely won't see revisions until there
>> is a need to revise them!
>>
>
> I agree that a lot can be accomplished without making this change.
>
> I also agree that there are no "unchangeable" laws that would prevent
> changing how voting is done in Congress.
>
> Yet special interests -- i.e. the biggest campaign contributors -- will
> never intentionally allow such changes -- because they know how to control
> ("rig") the system under the current laws/rules.
>

dlw: Small Local Third Parties, what I call LTPs, that rely mainly on
volunteer power and specialize in contesting "more local" elections will be
the natural check on the influence of $peech on both major parties and
major-party wannabes who start to become successful.

>
>  I think I might agree with you to some extent, in that I don't really
>> care how many party labels there are. Whether there are two, three, ten,
>> or zero, doesn't
>> tell me much of anything by itself.
>>
>
> Well said!
>

I agree.  We need to foster the meritocratic circulation of the elites and
to change their incentives so that they are more responsive to the needs of
ethnic/economic/ideological minority groups and able to work out solutions
to our pressing problems in a timely fashion.

dlw

>
> Richard Fobes
>
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at lavabit.com>
> To: ElectionMethods at VoteFair.org
> Cc: election-methods at electorama.com
> Date: Sun, 19 Feb 2012 10:04:41 +0100
> Subject: Re: [EM] (Kevin Venzke) and Richard Fobes.
> On 02/19/2012 06:04 AM, Richard Fobes wrote:
>
>> David Wetzell, your reply reveals that we view the U.S. political system
>> very differently.
>>
>> Here is a link to a "map" of the U.S. political system as I see it:
>>
>> http://www.votefair.org/**pencil_metaphor.html<http://www.votefair.org/pencil_metaphor.html>
>>
>> "If the Republican party and the Democratic party are at opposite ends
>> of a pencil, most of the voters are way above the pencil. Both parties
>> are pulled down away from the voters by the money coming from the
>> biggest campaign contributors."
>>
>> Please see the illustration on that page for details. (Of course it is
>> simplified.)
>>
>> The main point is that the gap between the voters and the politicians is
>> bigger than the smaller gap between the two main political parties.
>>
>
> KM: I like third parties, so let me use a business metaphor. Say you have
> a monopoly. This monopoly has market-making power, so it can set prices as
> it wants and produce worse goods than it actually would.
>
> If a monopoly has absolute power, i.e. no competition, it sets its prices
> so that MR = MC, to maximize its profit. Let's call that the equivalent of
> a party that's completely under non-democratic influence, such as the one
> party in a one-party state. That would correspond to, in your picture, the
> party being all the way at the bottom by "special interests".
>
> If you now add another company to make a duopoly, then the old monopoly
> loses some of its market power. Its products will be priced a bit closer to
> the ideal (perfect competition) case of P = MC because each duopolist has
> to concede some power to the other. (For the sake of the argument, we
> assume collusion, if any, is less than required to turn the duopoly into a
> de-facto monopoly; also, we assume we're far from the area where
> monopolistic competition stops the push towards P=MC.)
>
> Adding yet new businesses will push the price further towards the P = MC
> point (the "good" one) where the companies have to provide what the people
> want. In the political realm, adding new parties will push all parties
> closer to the top of your pencil graph.
>

dlw: But there are "economies of scale" in the wielding of the state's
monopoly on the legit uses of violence and thereby we can't expect perfect
competition to ever exist in the political realm.
And what of a contested duopoly, not unlike a contested monopoly that would
bring the outcome closer to the "ideal" without increasing the number of
bigger parties as much???

>
> To be more simple about it: in the economic realm, permitting competition
> means that the companies can't afford to not care about their customers any
> more. Why should this not also be the case of the political realm? If there
> were two parties, the special interests could buy them both off, but if
> there were ten, the special interests would have to buy all of *those* off,
> or one of the parties would say "if I move my platform away from what the
> people want, towards what you want, then the voters will leave me for one
> of the other nine".
>

dlw: If there's uncertainty as to which major party is in power then the
purveyors of $peech will have to hedge and accept a lower and/or more
variable return.  And if 3rd parties are given a constructive role they
will not monopolize the public square after hedging and there will be
cover-fire for #OWS-like movements that seek to move the center so that the
two major parties can't give $peech what it wants without risking the loss
of their duopoly status.

But generally, the people don't always know what they want, sometimes they
want short-term economic transfers that are destructive of long-term
decision-making and ultimately democracy itself.  This sort of difficulty
with democracy has been observed from the time of ancient Greece.   It is
why "modern democracies" tend to be an unstable mix of popular democracy
and oligarchy/kleptocracy.  Our goal, as I see it, in electoral reform is
not to replace the latter with the former but to bolster the former
relative to the latter.

>
> The analogy isn't perfect because voting happens more rarely than
> purchases and because political party positions are, by their nature,
> differentiated. However, it does make sense. If you have only two parties,
> then to make politics fair, you have to do a lot of work keeping the two
> parties honest -- but if you have more than two parties, you know that
> there's a limit to how dishonest the two parties can get, no matter who
> captures control of those two parties.
>
> And that seems - to me at least - to be a more solid guarantee than
> "two-party rule could work". Reforming the political parties improves the
> best case scenario, while changing the system improves the worst case
> scenario (short of the system itself being dismantled).
>

Any reform meant to make the US a multi-party system will have a low P due
to the necessity of getting leaders in the two major parties behind it.

dlw

>
> > dlw: If voters can help elect a 3rd party more easily then it
> > doesn't matter if there's a stronger role for party hierarchy
> > in the determination of their party's candidate.
>
> JG:This is far from the reality  -  it matters a great deal.  Most parties
> are coalitions, to greater or lesser degrees.  For example,
> here in the UK we still have "left" and "right" wings within the Labour
> Party and we have "pro-EU" and "anti-EU" wings with the
> Conservative Party.  If the party hierarchy can impose one political
> viewpoint by putting candidates from one wing of the party in
> all the winnable places on the party's list the many of the supporters of
> that party will be faced with a "hold your nose" choice  -
> either vote for they party's list dominated by "the other" wing or vote
> against the party altogether and let the opposition in.  And
> that's not theoretical  -  we have seen it done here in the UK where,
> sadly, we do have some party-list PR elections.


dlw: As I recall, there also are a growing number of small third parties in
UK that would check the sort of gaming the party-list by a faction.

If you have a 3-seat party list PR then the party's best strategy would be
to nominate a moderate from the dominant wing and/or to have a moderate
from the other wing as their vice-candidate.

Also, as I recall, your party-list PR elections were like for EU-MPs, which
are relatively less consequential.  If the elections were more important
then there'd be more pressure against such.

>
>
>
> > dlw: All that is true, but it does not change my point that
> > election reform got on the ballot in large part because the
> > use of quasi-PR in "more local" elections helped the LibDems
> > to continue to rival the two biggest parties.  When third
> > parties can gain foot-holds, there's inevitably going to be
> > pressure away from FPTP.
>
> This is also very far from the reality.  The role of the Liberal Democrats
> in UK-level politics has not been fostered by the use of
> PR voting systems (of various kinds) in some sub-UK elections.  The two
> things are not at all related and certainly had nothing to
> do with preparing any imaged climate for the AV referendum.


dlw: I could be wrong.  I understand that historically there was a 2-seat
version of FPTP used in the UK, which must have helped there to be more
than 2 major parties in the UK.
I don't know for sure if there are discernible trickle-up effects from the
use of PR in "More local" elections, but I expect such, even with the use
of FPTP.

dlw

>
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