[EM] Preferential Party-List Proportional Representation (PPLPR)

[Toby Pereira]

As other people have said, people come to this with their own specific interests. Not everyone is simply interested in all voting systems equally.

I have a dislike for party list systems because I tend to think that parties in general are too powerful, and I prefer to vote for candidates. It's not that I have anything in particular against a group of likeminded people coming together and standing on the same platform, but that's not how it really is in practice - at least with the big parties. I'm from the UK, and the two main parties are the Conservative Party and the Labour Party. And the problem is that when you have parties of this size and dominance, they become less about ideologies (except at a very coarse level) and more about two brands trying to get the most of the market share - like Pepsi and Coca Cola. So a system - such as party list - that entrenches the power of parties goes against my ideology. I would prefer a system like Jameson Quinn's PAL system http://wiki.electorama.com/wiki/PAL_representation and I've written about what I think in more detail here
 http://tobypereira.wordpress.com/2014/07/30/electoral-reform-3-a-reasonable-way-of-electing-mps-proportionally/ But in brief, I think we should have proportional elections, but one national election rather than regional elections, where candidates can stand for parties but also equally as independents. So, for example, we have 650 Members of Parliament in the UK, so I would argue that if an independent has 1/650 of the national support, wherever it comes from, they should be able to be elected.

With your particular election method, it doesn't look particularly proportional to me anyway. It seems that if party A and party B have half the support each, then the party A supporters could encroach into party B's allocation by also ranking party C. I don't personally think that party list PR needs new methods above and beyond candidate PR methods. As I think I said in a previous post, if my party preference is A>B>C, then we can use an existing STV method for this. So if there are five seats available, my ranking preferences are A1...A5>B1...B5>C1...C5. Similarly with systems of proportional score and approval voting, every candidate from each party would be set at your score for that party, or whether you approve/don't approve that party.

Toby



 From: Vidar Wahlberg <canidae at exent.net>
>To: election-methods at lists.electorama.com 
>Sent: Thursday, 6 November 2014, 9:26
>Subject: Re: [EM] Preferential Party-List Proportional Representation (PPLPR)
>  
>
>On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 10:52:06PM +0100, Vidar Wahlberg wrote:
><snip>
>
>I'm curious, there seems to be very little interest for party-list
>systems on this mailing list.
>When it comes to governments, party-list is quite common in the more
>successful democracies. Still, even party-list systems tend to lead to
>2-3 parties being the dominating and practically unchallengeable forces.
>The "wasted vote" mentality is still around in party-list democracies,
>and parties that are liked by most, but not as their first preference,
>will not gain much influence.
>I find little research done on improving party-list systems, and I find
>it unlikely that existing party-list systems would abandon party-list in
>favour of directly voting for candidates.
>
>So why doesn't this gain more attention?
>
>
>
>-- 
>Regards,
>Vidar Wahlberg
>----
>Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/emfor list info
>
>
>    
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