[EM] APR (5): Steve's 5th dialogue with Juho

[steve bosworth]

APR (5):  Steve's 5th dialogue with Juho For:  To-Juho5

 



> Message: 3

> Date: Tue, 2 Dec 2014 15:51:00 +0200

> From: Juho Late <juho4880 at yahoo.co.uk>

> To: "election-methods at lists.electorama.com"

> <election-methods at lists.electorama.com>

> Subject: Re: [EM] (4) APR: Steve?s 4th dialogue with Juho

> Message-ID: <468B5E4F-C5D7-46B7-894B-5DC0A0400626 at yahoo.co.uk>

> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

> 

> > On 28 Nov 2014, at 23:32, steve bosworth
<stevebosworth at hotmail.com> wrote:

> > 

S:  At the end of your post you say:



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

>

S:
I should make it clear that I do not claim that APR is “a readymade solution to
most political problems”.  Instead, for the
reasons that I have attempted present in the more complete explanation remaining
at the end of this post: it would seem to be the best electoral system, i.e. it
seems to provide an essential element of the structural political conditions
that would maximize the probability that democratic solutions to problems will
be found.  If you disagree with this
claim, I would like to understand your reasons.

 

>
> 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.

> 

J:  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).

 

S:  Please do not think you have to be
“neutral”.  Please take sides when you
think reason is on your side and explain. 


 

S:  If you are already completely happy with your
country’s electoral system, please tell me about it and explain why you think
APR would be worse.  As you already know,
currently, I would want to argue that APR would be even better for your
“multiparty” situation.  Please tell me
more.

> 

> > 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.

> > >

> > S: It would help even more if you would clarify what you mean by
?good? in each of the above phrases.

> 

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

 

S:  Do you see that APR’s weighted votes would
make this proportionality complete, as well as making each citizen’s vote equally
(mathematically) to count in the assembly? 

> 

> “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)

> 

S:  Do you also see APR as essential to the
maximization of such “responsiveness”?



J:  “good understandability” = voters understand
how to vote, what each candidate 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 democracy” = 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.)

> 

S:  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.

> 

J:  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.



S:  Does your preferred system need to waste some
votes?  If so, how is this justified?



>
> J: That is one approach to making a sensible system. I'd like to see the
weighted vote approach tested somewhere.

> > 

> > 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.

> 

J:  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:  Are you satisfied in this regard with the
existing limit of 10% of all the weighted votes?

 

> > 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??

> 

J:   A system that tends to give one part of the
country more seats than others is not geographically proportional. I guess we
cannot 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.

 

S: Do you also see that APR would structural enable any such bias to be
eliminated exactly to the degree desired by citizens.

> 

> > J: With geographical proportionality I don't mean proportionality
with respect to where the land is but proportionality with respect to where
people live.

> > 

> > S: Is not this ?proportionality? determined by the number of people
who live there?

> …………………….

 

S:
I think you already see that this understanding of “proportionality” as
determined by numbers of voters, entirely conforms to APR.

 

…………………….

> > 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.

> > 

> > S: Do you think that this could ever be properly justified?

> ……………..

> > S: Why isn?t APR?s exact, rather than ?rough?, proportionality
better?

…………………….

 

>
S:  If you agree that “exact
proportionality is a good target”, would this not make APR your own ideal system?  It removes all “rounding errors”.

> 

………………………

S:  For me, only citizen (and party)
proportionality is justified, therefore, representation through the electoral “associations”
offered by APR.

> 

J:  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:  I accept that “taste” is currently, in fact,
an important determinant in politics and in life generally.  However, do you not also agree that in
politics, when “taste” conflicts with the conclusions based on the available
evidence and rational thought, taste should be overruled?  As I see it, rational thought in a democracy
requires us to respect the mathematically equality of each citizen’s vote in
the legislative assembly.  It is this
assembly that should make any binding decisions with regard to the importance
of any “land”, “city”, or “tradition”. 
If so, this possibly argues against your following claim if you believe
“geographical … proportionality” should be justified by something other than
the number of citizens who would join its geographically defined “electoral
association”:

 

J:
………..(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:  > > > 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 systems put less weight on "who
values those areas" (and more on "who lives in those areas").

> > >

S:  This is why APR gives each citizen one vote,
countrywide.

>


> > 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?

> 

J:   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 in the problems of the remote
areas. You could say that voters can now blame themselves, and that they could
have voted only for the candidates of their own area. But typical voters are
not that organized. ….

 

………………………..

J:
 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.

> 

S:  Again, what do you make of the more
concentrated explanation at the end of this post?  It explains how APR’s Primary and its
associational structure would help to produce a legislative assembly that is
more likely to make laws base on rational thought and the available evidence?  This same explanation argues that this
associational structure would help to reduce the power of the mass media (TV),
celebrity, and money (i.e. the worry you voice in your next paragraph).  

 

In
any case, APR would enable all the citizens who understand and care about “the
problems of the remote areas” to form an association to defend these areas in
proportion to the weighted votes of this association’s reps.  Of course, some people who live anywhere in
the country (including the cities) could be electors of this association.

 

J:
………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).

………………………..

> 

S:  How the Electoral Associations
Produced by APR?s Primary Elections Increase Positive Voting: 

> > 

> > 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.

> > 

> > 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.

> > 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. 

> 

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

> 

S:  As I see it, any group of citizens
with the following would automatically be placed on the list of applicant
organizations by the central electoral commission for APR’s Primary election:  payment of a small administration fee, official
name, address, a statement of its mission, a description of its current
organizational rules, a statement of the kind of citizens it would like to have
as its electors for general election purposes, and a description of the
necessary qualifications (if any) a candidate must have in order to be place on
its general election ballot if it becomes accepted as an electoral
“association”.

 

S:
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). 

> > 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.

> > 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 mo

> re 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).

> > 

> > 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.

> > 

> > 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. 

> 

J: 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.

 > 

S: 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.

> > 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.> 

> > 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.

> 

J:  That is a rather general and strong
statement.

 

S:  Does this mean you think it is not
justified?  If so, why not?

>  

S:  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.

> > > 

> > 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.

> > 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.

> > 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.

> 

S:  What do you think?

 

>
Juho

>

 		 	   		  
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.electorama.com/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/attachments/20141204/35e781d2/attachment-0001.htm>