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

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 01/01/2017 08:35 PM, Juho Laatu wrote:
>> On 01 Jan 2017, at 21:16, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
>> <km_elmet at t-online.de> wrote:
> 
>> On 01/01/2017 07:06 PM, ElectionMethods wrote:
> 
>>> (I presume closed-list PR is dominant in Europe because many
>>> members of parliament would be unlikely to get re-elected under
>>> open-list PR.)
>> 
>> If the "old parties heading off the socialist challenge" theory is
>> correct, it would also explain why closed list PR is so common; the
>> old parties weren't in it for egalitarian purposes, but rather as a
>> necessary compromise. Open list would not have been required in
>> such a scenario, just interparty PR. The only situation that would
>> force open list would be if closed list would have led to too
>> mediocre candidates within the old parties and thus to voters
>> flocking to the socialists anyway.
> 
> I guess in many cases the rule is that those who have power want to
> stay in power. If there are two parties in power, they don't want to
> donate it to the third and fourth party. If there is some level of
> proportionality in the system, the incumbent parties don't want to
> distribute that power to parties that are smaller than themselves. If
> party officials can decide which candidates will be first on the
> party list, they don't like the idea of letting voters decide which
> candidates will be elected.

Suppose we use a Chatelierian model for the established party
organizations. That is, they want to keep the power that they have had
so far -- they ideally want a ratchet that smoothly goes one way
(towards the party having more power), but blocks the other way (towards
the party losing power).

Then it's reasonable that, in the face of a challenge, they would try to
keep as much power as possible. If they see PR as a necessary
concession, they would go no further than the concession requires them
to do.

Initially I thought that this line of reasoning would be too strong,
because it'd imply that the old parties would try to push towards either
mostly-majoritarian voting (e.g. parallel voting instead of MMP) or
towards the other extreme (each party gets a fixed number of seats).

But the method can't be made to favor the elite parties directly, only
to favor large parties vs favoring small parties. And if the danger is
that the new party (e.g. the socialists) become the new large party, the
large-party bias will end up hurting the old parties, which the old
parties don't want. Conversely, if the new method has a small-party
bias, then parties smaller than whatever the old parties end up having
will usurp some of the old parties' power.

So (perhaps speculating a bit much), you'd expect the old parties to
favor a PR method that has an anti-small-party bias for anything below
the level the old parties would expect to drop to in support, and then
be proportional beyond that point.

(It seems more reasonable to suppose that parties oppose losing power
rather than that they actively try to alter the political system to
cement power in their hands. Otherwise, representative democracy would
not have lasted long. So if we're talking about successful democracies,
the parties there can't be of the sort that would completely destroy the
system if that would get them a president for life.)