[EM] Preferential voting system where a candidate may win multiple seats

[Juho Laatu]

On 7.7.2013, at 16.16, Vidar Wahlberg wrote:

> On Fri, Jul 05, 2013 at 11:37:55PM +0200, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
>> The argument then
>> is that if you add in lots of very small parties, any of them might
>> become a kingmaker and so get extremely disproportional amounts of
>> power.
> 
> While I see the point, I think this may be a bit too simplified. Where
> as small parties in Norway possibly do have more influence than their
> size dictates, they arguably do not have the same power as the larger
> parties.

Let's say we have two left wing parties and one right wing party.
46% L1
5% L2
49% R

Should we redulce the number of seats of L2 so that it would not get too much power. By doing so we would change the left wing majority to a right wing majority. Small parties can be needed to build up majorty coalition governments. I think it is fair to give them their proportional number of seats. At least in Finland small parties have much smaller role in the coalition governments than the largest parties have. It is also typical that large parties collect so many small parties in the govenment that even if one of them would leave the government, the government would still have majority. This guarantees that no single small party can blackmail the government. The small parties need to consider also what would happen at the next time if they try to play bigger role in the government that their size is.

> Alternatively, instead of running Sainte-Laguë in each county, you could
> run SL on the national result (distributing all 169 seats), something
> which would produce a representation percentage very close to the actual
> result, and then distribute the seats to the parties in the different
> counties (keeping the same amount of seats in each county).

I think this makes sense if you do not like the leveling seat style of building proportionality at national level. The last seats will be distributed pretty much in the same way anyway, but in this approach all seats are in principle seen as "equal". The algorithm may either aim at some ideal allocation, or be a practical algorithm that just finds a good enough result.

If we want full proportinality, then proportionality should thus be counted at national level. Another reason why national level votes should be used to count the number of seats for each party is that one should guarantee that it makes sense to vote for the small paries also in the smallest counties. If there is no such prcedure or leveling seats or some other national level leveling algorithms in place, it would not make sense to vote for small parties in the small counties. this would reduce the support of the smallest parties already before the votes are counted.

This kind of balancing mechanisms will lead to electing a representative of the small party at least in some county, or maybe in this voter's own county, even if the number of votes would not be sufficient to win any of the seats, if seats would be allocated independently in each county.

Juho