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

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 07/19/2013 07:45 AM, Juho Laatu wrote:
> On 18.7.2013, at 23.36, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
>
>> (And now that I think about it: if it's desired, it should be
>> possible to make n-proportional apportionment methods for n>2 --
>> e.g. a method that tries to balance regional representation,
>> national representation, and representation of minorities according
>> to their share of the population. The greater n is, though, the
>> less intuitive the results will be.)
>
> I think any number of such (voted or static) "proportionalities"
> could be used. To me the biggest problem is that the "rounding
> errors" will increase, and as a result we will get also some strange
> results. That means some "less intuitive" results as you say, but
> maybe also more intuitive/fair in the sense that all groups will be
> fairly represented.

With monoporopotional representation (ordinary PR), it's fairly easy to 
explain to people what is going on: you get representatives 
proportionally to what the voters say they want, in each district. With 
biproportional representation between districts and nationwide results, 
the proportionality becomes less obvious. A voter may say: "Why did 
party A get the seat, when it had fewer votes than party B, C, D and E, 
and there were only 4 seats?". The response to this is: "so that there 
will be better proportional representation when you count the nation as 
a whole". But then the voter may say: "why did *we* get the strange 
result? Why not the district over there?". And because of the 
simultaneous constraints, it would be much harder to explain that, 
because you might need to refer to the entire nationwide result to do it.

In short, multiple constraints might mean that the results "over here" 
depends on what happens "over there" in a way that's not easy to 
understand. And the more constraints you add, the harder it could get.

> With "voted" and "static" proportionalities I refer to e.g.
> percentage of votes to women vs. percentage of women in the society.
>
> In real life having political and regional proportionality may be
> enough for most countries, but I can see that in countries where the
> balance betheen different groups of the society is critical, also
> other proportionalities can be useful. This would allow e.g.
> different ethnic groups to work within one (ideological) party
> instead of being split in separate ethnic parties.

Yes. Also, if part of the point of representative democracy is that the 
groups should take their conflict to parliament rather than resorting to 
physical violence, accurate representation of ethnic groups might be 
important where there has been struggle between those groups. Hylland 
used an example of Bosnia-Herzegovina: 
http://web.archive.org/web/20061005063631/http://www.oekonomi.uio.no/seminar/torsdag-v02/hylland-notes.doc 
 In his example, the two axes are geographical representation and 
ethnic representation.

In such cases, I would also suggest a few of the seats of the parliament 
be given by a centrist- or minmax-based method (e.g. Condorcet, CPO-SL 
with few seats, or possibly even minmax approval or something like it). 
The idea would be that there shouldn't be any kingmakers, but if there's 
a near-tie, that tie is broken by a moderate group.