[EM] Sociological issues of elections

[Juho Laatu]

On 31.8.2013, at 15.24, Vidar Wahlberg wrote:

> This may be a bit outside what is usually discussed here, but I'll give
> it a shot and if someone know of some resources I should check up on
> then please let me know.
> 
> I've not followed this list for a long time, but my impression is that
> the main focus is on the technical or mathematical properties, and less
> on the sociological issues.
> 
> For instance, when voting for persons then candidates with high
> popularity and charisma are likely to win more votes than less
> charismatic candidates, despite the less charismatic candidates being
> far more suited for the task (more knowledge, experience, talent, etc.).
> In the Norwegian system where we got multiple parties, but two blocks
> (left and right), we also see that some people vote for their second
> preference rather than the first, because the first is in the wrong
> block or intend to cooperate with another party which the voter dislike
> the most.
> 
> If it is within the scope of this list, what are your thoughts on the
> subject?

In my opinion this is very much in scope. And from "technical or mathematical properties" point of view, these considerations may well have an impact on what kind of techniques one should use.

I'd try to solve the problem of charismatic candidates by offering more information about the candidates to the voters, and allowing all candidates equal amount of publicity (visual, non-visual, real time, offline, net). What more could we do? Voters must anyway find out themselves which candidates are really good despite of not so good charisma, and which ones have nice charisma but nothing behind the charisma. The system can not make these evaluations for them, so we just need to increase the openness and informativeness of the system.

Then the problem of people not voting for otherwise good candidates that have bad ideas like cooperation with unwanted parties, or who are from the wrong bock. I think also here voters should decide how much weight they put on different topics. If cooperation and correct wing are important, then that candidate really is bad and the voter should not vote for him.

I guess here we come also close to the problem of voters being unable (e.g. in traditional list based systems) to give support to some selected set of candidates that come from multiple parties, but not to the other candidates of those parties. Typically voters can also give their vote to one candidate only, and that vote might end up supporting wrong candidates (if the favourite candidate will not be elected).

> Alternatively:
> Assuming the perfect election system where voting any different than
> your real preference would only hurt your preference, how would you
> design a form of government that is elected by the people, but is
> resistant to sociological issues that can't be prevented by the election
> method (such as the examples mentioned above)?

I think we would first have to agree what kind of a government is a good government. There can be many opinions, and for different kind of political systems the choice may be different.

From a traditional multiparty perspective a good government might be one that represents majority of the voters but not if we want to have an opposiition too. (this is just one option)

Traditionally we want there to be static parties (other options possible too). The government would typically consist of multiple parties. A typical approach is that voters must choose their party and some preferred candidate(s) within that party. (Alternatively voters could indicate support also to good candidates from multiple parties.)

Traditionally governments are formed only after the election, which means that the voter will not vote for a government coalition but that parties will build the coalition by themselves. It is however also quite common that possible government coalitions are quite well known and fixed already before the election (I guess Norway is closer to this). (It would be possible to have also elections where voters will decide what kind of government to form, but I guess this approach is not in use anywhere.)

When you wrote about "a form of government that is elected by the people", did you mean that voters should have more say on what the government (coalition) will be like? I.e. do you dislike both the approach of two fixed alternatives and the approach of parties negotiating the coalition structure after the election?

Anyway, whether decided by the voters or by the parties (/ elected representatives) after the election, a good government coalition might be one that has proportional representation of all those parties that will form the government.

Within those parties one has different options on how to pick the ministers. The ministers could be representatives that got a lots of support from the voters. Or alternatively the ministers could be ones that have support from the representatives (this approach alloas also nomination of ministers that are not representatives themselves). Party internal proportionality would be a good approach here. Also regional proportionality should be respected (as well as practical).

In order to get all relevant input from the voters, the ballots could be ranked ballots (allowing ranking within or also across the parties), or the parties could be internally structured so that a vote to one candidate would be inherited by some set (smaller than a party) of similar minded candidates. Closed lists might be to coarse for what ypu had in mind (?). (Or maybe multiple closed lists with different rankings of the same candidates might do.)

Coming back to the problem of charismatic candidates. If the candidates are grouped (into parties and further into smaller groupings), votes to charismatic candidates could support also less charismatic candidates of the same grouping. This would to some extent reduce the problem of electing only/mainly charismatic candidates (and beautiful candidates, fluent speakers, good actors and candidats with empty promises).

It is also possible that if we allow the parties/groupings to elect their ministers among themselves, the really competent candiates could be elected more often (instead of the "charismatic only" candidates). Indirect democracy may thus serve some of your needs here (since the representatives know each others better than the voters too, and can see through their masks / charismatic appearances).

If we now study the path of allowing the voters to decide directly what the coalition will look like, there are at least two options. One straight forward option would be to present different coalitions and programs to them and then use some good single-winner method to pick the best alternative out of these.

The other option in my mind is to derive the ideal coalition directly from the votes to the individual candidates (or allow voters to rank all the parties). This gets quite tricky though. Since all coalitions do not make sense, we should probably seek for coalitions that are wide but that have contain a set of rather similar minded parties. We could use a CPO style method that compares all different possible coalitions and picks one whose all members have wide support among all the supporters of the coalition. I will not go deeper into these criteria at this post. The idea is just to pick a government that would have solid support of all the members. Probably this approach is bit too theoretical and may lead to surprise results too easily to be adopted quicly into use in real elections.

The width of the coalition is also an interesting question. Maybe it should be well above 50%. In Finland the tradition seems to be to have coalitions that are wide anough to maintain their majority even if one of the smallest parties would leave the government. The coalition should also not be too wide since I assumed that we want to have a credible opposition too (with possibility to be the main body of the next government). This would leave us maybe below 66.7% or below 75% support. (The automatic coalition election algorithm should take also the optimality of the width of the coalition into account.)

One option is to only collect voter preference information for the parties / representatives to be taken into account when forming the government. Or, if we used a single-winner method to rank different coalitions, then each of these coalitions could be offered (one by one) the possibility to form the government, if they find an agreement among themselves. Or, if we have established the preference order of different coalitions, one could allow parties to propose coalitions and allow the coalition with highest ranking to start the negotiations.

Now I should stop and ask if I'm totally off the track that you planned.

Juho


> 
> 
> -- 
> Regards,
> Vidar Wahlberg
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