[EM] (4) APR: Steve’s 4th dialogue with Juho

[Juho Late]

> On 28 Nov 2014, at 23:32, steve bosworth <stevebosworth at hotmail.com> wrote:
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> S: Perhaps you would be willing to focus on and explain your own electoral recommendations with regard to a specific country: your own, the UK, the USA, or ???????????  That would help me better to understand your current position.

Not very easy. I have a proportional multiparty background, so I tend to lean in that direction, but when we talk e.g. about the USA, I try to be neutral, just commenting on what might work for your needs (whatever they are).

> J:  > In the current state of affairs, globally, in multi- winner systems. In most cases I'd support good proportionality (could be political, geographical and others if needed), avoidance of obvious strategic incentives an fraud, good responsiveness to voter opinions, and good understandability. I thus want to see working democracies around.
> >
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> S:  It would help even more if you would clarify what you mean by “good” in each of the above phrases.

good proportionality = simply, n% of the votes (or voters or citizens in some cases) gives n% of the seats

good responsiveness to voter opinions = voters will feel that if they have some opinion, the outcome of the election will reflect that opinion right away, and the policy, the government, the laws, the ruling parties etc. will change as a result of that expressed opinion (voters will not feel e.g. that whatever way they vote, the rulers and policy will stay the same anyway)

good understandability = voters understand how to vote, what each candiate and party stands for, and how the results will change depending on how people vote (the whole process should thus be 100% understood by all the voters, from candidate nomination and party formation to government formation and all the way to the next election)

working demoracy = could be said to mean that most voters think that "government = us", i.e. there are no "others" that rule the country instead of the voters (as a result there is no need for mutinies, complaints etc.)

> I think you already understand that for me, an electoral system is “good” to the extent that it fully respects the equality of each citizen by allowing each to guarantee that his or her vote will never be wasted

That's one good target. It is good to never waste votes, or at least to waste them seldom enough so that voters can vote as if no votes would be ever wasted.

> J:  That is one approach to making a sensible system. I'd like to see the weighted vote approach tested somewhere.
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> S:  Of course, I would also like to see it tested.  However, before such a test, do you see any specific reasons to think that it would at all be dangerous or destructive?  I don’t.

 I don't see any such major problems that would make this approach unusable. One of my smaller practical implementation related concerns is possible big differences in voting power. But that can be easily fixed by limiting the max voting power.

> S:  I can see why you might say that the “central cities would” have “more” seats, but it is pejorative to say this is “disproportionate”.  What value do you have in mind to make you see these “more seats” to be “bad”?

A system that tends to give one part of the country more seats than others is not geographically proportional. I guess we can not assume that central cities or their candidates would be somehow more valuable, and we would therefore want this bias to exist. Typically different parts of the country have somewhat different viewpoints, and therefore we want to eliminate also this kind of (typical voting behaviour based) bias.

> J:  With geographical proportionality I don't mean proportionality with respect to where the land is but proportionality with respect to where people live.
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> S:  Is not this “proportionality” determined by the number of people who live there?

That is the typical case. (Alternatively one could also base it on the number of voters or casted votes.)

> J:  That is the common approach. Political/party proportionality is normally more important than geographical proportionality.
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> S:  Again, is not this proportionality also determined by the number of people who voted for each party?

Yes.

> J: You can have both at the same time. In some places also the land area is used in a proportional way [i.e. to determine the number of reps allowed to represent these hectors], but that is to my understanding very rare.
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> S: Do you think that this could ever be properly justified?

I guess that is most often based on tradition. For example in the USA some states may have more power than others per voter since that's what people agreed when the federation was formed.

Land mass based proportionality may make sense also in places where people feel that one key function of the society in question is to take care of the land / nature. Maybe we are talking about some nature related unit here. Also some very green countries could be partially proportional in this way (probably not very common).

> S:  Why isn’t APR’s exact, rather than “rough”, proportionality better?

Exact proportionality is a good target. Often rough proportionality is good enough. Sometimes one can trade exact proportionality to some other nice feature. I discussed earlier also the interest to implement many different proportionalities at the same time. This often leads to some rounding errors that force the system to deviate from exact proportionality. The approach of having representatives with different voting power can be used also to fix this kind of rounding errors.

> > > J: The reason behind that is that the best known candidates often live in the large cities, and small town people typically vote city candidates more often than city voters vote for the small town candidates. Many countries use multi-winner districts because of this reason.
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> S:  True, but is this better than the representation through the electoral “associations” offered by APR?

It is a matter of taste which features are important and which ones are not. Some variant of APR could well implement also geographical proportionality (without losing too much of its original flavour).

> S: Above and below, you are accurately describing some various electoral practices in the world but I am waiting to understanding your prime value or hierarchy of values which might guide you to decide on which reforms would best suite different unsatisfactory circumstances.  Perhaps this will be clarified in the light of the explanations of exactly what you might mean above by “good”.

Maybe I was asking you if you think that also geographic proportionality should be respected just like accurate political proportionality is respected in APR. I come from a background with geographic proportionality, and the single winner districts of USA implemnt one very strict model of geographic proportionality today. That's why this topic may be of interest to both of us. You will decide if it is important for the future that you are planning.

> > I'm not proposing to use land area as one basis of proportionality in this case.  In most countries the approach of using "where people live" is one basis of proportionality. This means that those system put less weight on "who values those areas" (and more on "who lives in those areas").
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> S:  Do you see any justification for ignoring what these residents value?

In what sense would one ignore their values? (Note that geographical and political proportionality can be implemented also simultaneously. Land mass based proportionality would give different weights to different voters, but normal geographical proportionality gives all voters the same weight.)

> J:  …………If one … wants to let the voters decide, then one can take the "who values those areas" approach….  My claim is that in the USA, if only one single district is used, Hollywood, Washington D.C. and New York would probably get more representatives than their relative size of the population is, and Montana, Idaho, and non central areas within each state less.
> > 
> S:  Do you see this as a problem, provided also that each American citizen would have a rep in the US House of Representatives with a weighted vote who he or she trusts most?

A typical potential problem could be that most government money and effort would be spent in serving those few central cities, and nobody would be interested of the problems of the remote areas. You could say that voters can now blame themselves, and that they could have voted only for the candidtes of their own area. But typical voters are not that organized. They tend to vote for the most visible figures anyway, and that leads to some bias in favour of the central cities and the most visible candidates. In some sense geographical proportionality forces the system to elect representatives that are not most popular, but that is intended to be for the benefit of the voters, and to represent them and their opinions better and more accurately than the voters would vote themselves (if they were given the chance to vote for the public figures that they know from TV).

> Are there some compelling reasons?

There are many reasons why having a primary could be less than optimal. Additional complexity and costs is one thing. If you can do it at one round, why not. In the USA the primaries are needed today mainly because of the FPTP method. In APR you can choose freely.

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> How the Electoral Associations Produced by APR’s Primary Elections Increase Positive Voting
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> Let me try to explain more fully why I think that APR without its Primary and the ‘official electoral associations’ it discovers would only be a second best APR option.  Firstly and most obviously, APR would seem to help maximize the quality of representation for each citizen during the general election by making it relatively easy for each elector secretly to rank as many candidates in the whole country as each might wish.   This enables each to guarantee that their vote will be added to the ‘weighted vote’ in the legislative assembly of their most favoured representative (or most favoured by their first choice but eliminated candidate). 

Primaries and associations is one way to avoid wasting votes. Another one would be ranked votes (to individual candidates) with inheritance to parties / associations that have been formed in some other way before the election.

> However, this qualitative advantage would seem also to be enhanced further by the consequences of APR’s Primary election.  The Primary discovers both the popular voluntary organizations in civil society that will be recognized as the official electoral ‘associations’, and the number of representatives each will be allow to elect to the assembly months later during the general election.  To the extent that this would both help to energize these popular associations politically and stimulate more attractive candidates to seek office in the general election, the quality of representation in the assembly would be raised.
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> APR’s Primary differs from the ones that are sometimes used currently, e.g. in the USA.  It would not decide which one of each party's candidates will run in the general election.  Instead, it allows each citizen to choose to become a voting-member of his or her most favoured electoral ‘association' for general election purposes.

Allows and forces.

>   These associations are established by citizens choosing them from the list of all the voluntary organizations in the country that want to elect at least one member of the legislative assembly directly. 

I guess you need also rules on how associations can be formed before the plenary.

> This list would have been compiled previously by the central electoral commission.  These organizations need not be geographically defined and would probably also include all the political parties, many of the existing electoral districts, and many interest groups (e.g. business, labour, professional, social, environmental, recreational, ethnic, or religious).
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> Again, each citizen becomes an elector for the later general election through one of these associations by ranking as many of these applicant organizations as they might wish during the Primary.  A citizen would rank the organization first that he or she believes will offer the most attractive candidates during the general election, the organization that accords best with his own values and interests.  Any citizen that does not participate in the Primary is automatically registered as a voter in the geographically defined association (district) in which he or she resides.
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> Citizens know these organizations through their work, profession, daily lives, and/or their activities throughout the year. The daily living connections that people have with these organizations help them to know how to vote and how otherwise to participate politically in accord with their own valued life experiences.  The Primary’s counting of these rankings would reveal the ‘approximate’ mathematical importance given by the public to each of the geographically or non-geographically defined, applicant organizations with regard to political life.  Still, the ‘exact’ mathematical importance of each would instead be determined later by citizens’ secret votes during the general election, these being added to the weighted votes of each ‘association’s’ representative(s).  Each organization discovered to be one of the most popular organizations which together contain all citizens as their electors for general election purposes is officially recognized as an ‘association’.  The more popular an ‘association’ is discovered to be, the more representatives it will be allowed to elect (see p. 6 and Endnote 5 of my article).
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> In this way, APR’s Primary also enables all citizens and the state itself to discover which voluntary organizations should be officially recognized to have this proportionate extra political status and electoral function.  It would also be conducive to more rational participation on the part of citizens:  While choosing their voting membership during the Primary, each citizen is prompted to clarify their own scale of values and to decide on which organization most completely agrees with this scale.
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> At the same time, the recognition of these associations would provide an additional democratic channel for more enthusiastic participation in the political process both by these associations and their electors. This recognition also gives each association and its elected rep(s) an opportunity to plan and to focus their combined resources more efficiently to help shape the binding decisions taken by the state. 

The primary could contribute positively to the discussion and formation of different associations. There could of course be also other approaches to free formation of associations.

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> The time difference as well as the division of functions between the Primary and the general election would increase the opportunities for this coordination and rational political thinking to take place on the part of all concerned. This time gap also gives each association time to invite and to finalize the list of candidates who wish to represent it. It also gives time for potential candidates to apply and to prepare for the general election. The general election then additionally prompts each citizen more carefully to rank the individual candidates by considering which ones are more likely to work and vote for laws and policies in accord with the citizens own scale of values.
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> In fact, such rational thinking would seem to be assisted by the important knowledge discovered by the Primary.  It would have more reliably discovered the degree to which each previously well known, less know, and unknown ideology, party, interest group, or club is, or is not, relevant to the real concerns of the people.  This knowledge would enable all citizens, associations, potential candidates, and representatives more efficiently to plan how each can help to shape the laws of the land during the coming general election and after.
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> As a result of the above arrangements, APR, more than other systems, would seem to assist the development of a much closer identity between each elector and his representative, a more intense personal, ideological and mutual bond.  This would seem to contrast, on average, with the more defuse and vague relations between the agendas of each elector and the representatives elected by other systems.

That is a rather general and strong statement.

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> Again, the evolution of these closer relationships between electors, associations, and representatives would grow partly as a result of the time between the two elections.  Firstly, the “bottom-up” Primary might prompt more electors to start to familiarize themselves with the association’s officials, activists, and other potential candidates of their preferred organizations.   Thus, each APR representative is more likely to have been known and explicitly favoured by his electors at least several months before the general election.  Consequently, the ideological fit between each set of APR’s associations, electors, and representatives is likely to be much closer than that between each set of parties, districts, electors, and representatives in other systems.
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> As a consequence of this bond, the focus of each APR representative’s work both within the assembly and with his electors and association is more likely to be clear.    This increases the probability that each elector of a given association’s representative(s) will also be represented more efficiently in the assembly, that the quality of representation offered by APR is likely to be better than that provided by other systems.
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> Moreover, a legislative assembly composed of such different, clashing and well focused reps would seem more likely to provide an optimal debating and negotiating chamber for the production of laws based on evidence and rational thought. This is because it would more accurately reflect the real variety and intensity of people’s concerns.  If so, this assembly would also be better able to respond to the imperative to form a working majority in the assembly in order to produce wise legislative solutions to problems, solutions also agreeable to a majority of the people.  The fact that each APR representative, on average, is more likely to be focused and trusted by his or her electors would seem better to enable them also to arrive at any necessary compromises between the contending parties and representatives to achieve their common ends.
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> Finally, in addition to the above, it is relevant to note that many of APR’s ‘associations’ would presumably have communication and mobilization resources that are entirely independent of celebrity, the richest sections of society, and the mass media.  Thus, the addition of APR to an existing political system would probably help reduce the relative power of these sometimes anti-democratic forces in determining how people and their representatives vote.  This is because many citizens could more firmly, securely, and independently use the following opportunity provided by APR:  to see their favoured association and its representatives as providing an essential part of the best way to promote and protect their own abiding interests and values.

I think APR has many interesting features that are worth discussing. I wouldn't say that it is a ready made solution to most political problems.

Juho

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