[EM] Sociological issues of elections

[Michael Allan]

Vidar Wahlberg said:
> ... I would like to see a system where electors are encouraged to
> gain insight and reflected views, and vote thereafter.

Me too.  I spend much of my time chasing such a system (as do Abd and
Fred, I believe).  Please share what you find.

> ... Giving the electors balanced information and maintaining a
> transparent government is desirable, but this also depends on media
> and influental people "playing by the book". ...

They won't do that, of course, not when it would harm their interests.
Either we must change their interests or neutralize their influence.
One way to neutralize their influence would be to enable the electors
to listen instead to each other.  After all, they together are the
experts in the business of electing; the ones who do it every time;
and the best source of information on the subject.  Normally experts
are confident in their work and not easily influenced by non-experts.

To be sure, the crucial word is "together".  Elections are aggregates
not isolates.  The formal aggregate of votes is supposed to correspond
to an actual aggregate of voters in the social world, but it does not.
The individual votes are brought together to make a result, but the
individual voters are not brought together as such to make a decision;
therefore no valid decision can be extracted from the result.

The wrongful influence you mention in your original post might be just
a manifestation of this basic invalidity.  Suppressing, or disabling,
or failing to encourage valid influence (elector on elector) can only
help to encourage invalid influence to "pop up" in its place, as
though into a vacuum.  Do you follow my reasoning?

Mike


Vidar Wahlberg said:
> > Do you have a preferred solution of your own?
> 
> No, not really. Giving the electors balanced information and maintaining
> a transparent government is desirable, but this also depends on media
> and influental people "playing by the book". While better information
> obviously will improve electors ability to make rational decisions, it
> will still be quite possible to influence the voters based on less
> relevant traits (charisma, fearmongering, etc). Then again, what is
> relevant and what is not is neither a clear distinction.
> I mainly wanted to raise the subject that there's a lot of information
> going around before an election that's only meant to convince the
> elector to vote for a certain candidate/party, regardless of whether
> that would be the electors preference given enough insight into the
> candidate/party's capability. I would like to see a system where
> electors are encouraged to gain insight and reflected views, and vote
> thereafter.
> 
> Some claim that preferential election works well against negative
> campaigning, anyone looked into if there's any truth to this?
> 
> As mentioned, this really is a fuzzy area, and encouraging electors to
> vote based on a rational decision is obviously not a simple task. I
> appreciate all the feedback and would still like to hear more thoughts
> anyone may have.
> Many thanks to Gohlke for providing papers on the subject, I'm reading
> up on it when I got the time.
> 
> -- 
> Regards,
> Vidar Wahlberg