[EM] The Global Fight For Electoral Justice: A Primer

[Erik Moeller via Election-Methods]

On Fri, Dec 30, 2016 at 3:50 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
<km_elmet at t-online.de> wrote:
> I live in Norway, and although it is parliamentary, there are no snap
> elections. Legislative terms are fixed, and thus the electoral dynamics
> should be within the scope of the paper, but the description doesn't
> seem to match my experience.

Thank you for sharing your experiences from Norway, this is the kind
of thing that makes this mailing list very valuable. :) I found this
paper (link is to preprint) which gives some insights on the political
differences:
https://ecpr.eu/Filestore/PaperProposal/1efd4512-5bc9-4e89-9e04-9fe6ab26be8d.pdf

What it suggests is that Norway is overall a much more collaborative
government, with ad hoc parliamentary majorities and lots of minority
gov'ts. One could argue that this is parliamentary democracy done
right, without obsessive focus on majority rule. Certainly its ranking
along many dimensions (e.g., #1 in HDI, #6 in GDP per capita, #4 in UN
World Happiness ranking) supports the idea that this approach produces
positive policy outcomes.

People will quickly point out the relatively small size, the country's
oil richness and high ethnic homogeneity as contributors, though there
are plenty of examples of unstable governments under conditions
favoring stability. So while there are certainly challenges with
"scaling Norway", I do think it's an interesting model.

If you have the time, I'd appreciate any insights you have on the
experience with Norway's political life: has the system failed/broken
down in ways that you think may be generalizable to its political
system?

> (I just stumbled across a possible explanation for European introduction
> of PR - that it was a reaction to the increasing popularity of socialist
> parties, where the old parties came to the conclusion that it's better
> to be a smaller fish in a proportional pond than to be wiped out
> entirely if the socialists were to gain enough support to become the
> majority party. See e.g.
> http://web.stanford.edu/~jrodden/wp/rodden_jan10_workshop_final.docx . I
> don't know if this is the true reason, but if so, the US would be
> different since there was no such great threat of socialist majority.)

That's an interesting find, and shows how PR can be used to neutralize
perceived extremists rather than empowering them as is often claimed.

> MMP pays for this accuracy of district representatives by a greater
> distance to the regional representatives. To use a metaphor, while STV
> evenly spreads the distance from voters to representatives throughout
> the district, MMP moves some of the distance away from the district
> level (thus the district representatives seem more representative) onto
> the regional level (where they seem less so).

Well, in the single-vote Baden-Wuerttemberg variant described and
compared with other variants here:
https://www.institutions-democratiques.gouv.qc.ca/publications/mode_scrutin_rapport_en.pdf

.. any candidate who gets a compensatory seat has received a high
amount (in absolute votes) of local support. So you end up with, say,
Green Party representatives from the districts that love the Green
Party the most. These lists are compiled from regions within the
state, to avoid pulling only from the biggest population centers.

There are other ways to build these lists from the results of a
single-vote MMP election. All of them have characteristics in common,
most of which I think are positive:

- Local campaigning is necessary, creating not so much an electoral
threshold but a "seriousness threshold" and an economic cost that acts
against party fragmentation.

- For political preferences that are highly concentrated, you get
district representatives as in FPTP. For political preferences that
are more spread out, you get representatives that are at least a
reasonable match to the geographic areas where they have the most
support. This in turn supports the development of party infrastructure
and intra-party competition.

- Because you vote for both party and candidate and can't "vote-split"
as in ordinary MMP, new parties can beat established ones by
nominating more diverse candidates. Say the conservatives only ever
put up white men. If the Green Party more consistently nominates women
and minorities (as they in fact do), they may get an edge with those
constituencies (they're in fact now running the state, though I don't
know if this played a role).

What are the disadvantages? In theory, a party list system can produce
the best results for compensatory seats: make the best geographic
choices, allocate the best % of women/minorities (by legal quota),
identify the strongest leaders.

But then you either have to put a lot of power in the hands of the
party/government, or ask voters to familiarize themselves with a
larger roster of their preferred party's list candidates. Bavaria uses
an open list MMP variant, and it doesn't look like a lot of fun to me
due to the long lists:
http://www.fw-static.de/fileadmin/fw/oberbayern/dachau/dachau-land/Stimmzettel_Zweitstimme.jpg

>> Intuitively, I'm skeptical of the strategic voting properties in the
>> real-world, and the arguments on the site aren't wholly persuasive in
>> that regard. But some alternative-voting first-round (perhaps approval
>> rather than score) makes sense to me as an upgrade for jungle
>> primaries.
>
> One problem with both Approval and Range/Score in a runoff is that
> cloning pays. Suppose every party fields two identical candidates rather
> than one, and every voter ranks/rates them adjacent to each other. Then
> the two runoff spots will be occupied by the two clones from the party
> that won, which in essence bypasses the whole runoff.

Well, we already see lots of cases where the general election is
between two members of the same party, sometimes entirely due to split
votes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_State_Assembly_election,_2016

Approval voting at least would avoid a situation where the general
election is between two candidates the majority doesn't like. So if
you didn't go to the primary (which has a much lower turnout) this is
very frustrating. But you're right that having two very similar
choices is likely also not what most voters will want.

Instead, you could sum by party and then pick the top two plurality
winners among the top two party winners. Would that have undesirable
consequences? You might sometimes end up with a 90%/10% general
election but that actually might not be so bad -- it signals to
smaller parties and independents that there's some potential to put up
a competitive candidate. And in other races they'd be less likely to
act as a spoiler because the Republicans wouldn't be able to run two
candidates in the general.

Does that seem like a positive change to the Jungle Primary model? If
not, how would you change it?

Cheers,

Erik