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

[Kristofer Munsterhjelm]

On 12/31/2016 12:51 PM, Erik Moeller wrote:
> 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.

I didn't mean to imply that the Norwegian model is in some way easy to
export, just that it fits the criteria in Jack Santucci's paper yet does
not seem to follow the dynamics described there.

The ECPR paper you linked to suggests that ordinary parliamentary
systems don't really work as intended. Instead of the people controlling
the parliament, which in turn controls the government, the government
controls parliament. To put it differently, in formally equal
situations, the government tends to control the legislature. That in
turn implies that the parliamentary system should be "counterbiased" so
that the government is weaker and subordinate to parliament. The paper
then says that in Norway, the executive is weak (due to particular
decisions made when setting up parliamentarism).

> 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?

It's difficult to point to any obvious "high visibility" failure of the
political system. For the most part, it seems to work and correct itself
as required; it's much less "seesawy" than say, the US, in particularly
when minority governments are in place.

I suppose for better and worse, you get the feeling that there's "no
fuss". There's greater stability; I get the feeling that the mechanism
tracks a weighted combination of voters' opinions and the parties'
opinion much more smoothly than it does in places where democracy is
more of a jumpy ride.

But this stability carries with it a risk of "politicians becoming
managers of public life" (to quote Adam Curtis): basically doing a
competent job of keeping the country running and responding to
challenges, but not really setting a new course in political terms.
Another risk to this is that the increase in quality of life leaves the
voters content to just let the parties do their thing, so that certain
issues are not discussed as much as they should have.

This doesn't mean that politics here is without direction, only that it
is limited to directions that don't cause enough of an upset right away.
>From an anthropic perspective, this makes sense: the parties would get
thrown out before they can cause enough of an upset, or (in a similar
logic to how the executive anticipates what will pass parliament) you
get a selection for parties and MPs that will behave in a way that
doesn't cause enough of an upset.

However, exactly what can pass without upset can be quite surprising.
For instance, the majority of the people is opposed to Norway becoming
an EU member state. However, both the Labor and Conservative parties are
in favor. They know they can't accomplish this: formally becoming an EU
member state means giving up sovereignty and thus requires a
constitutional amendment, which can pass only by referendum or a 2/3
supermajority in parliament. To get around this, the politicians of both
Labor and Conservative parties act as if they were taking orders from
the EU already, and so EU directives are usually passed very quickly.
That gives much of the effect of being a member without formally being one.

Yet, for some reason, this behavior doesn't seem to have repercussions
as far as loss of support goes. I suspect the reason is that parties are
bundles of political positions, and if you support a certain party, you
have to pick the whole bundle or none of it (unless you're also a member
of that party and working to change its position from within). The
closed nature of party list also makes this stronger, because the party
leadership can set the composition of the list, favoring candidates who
agree with some particular bundle. In a way, each party has a more
majoritarian approach internally, in the sense that it's more "we choose
what factions to give a voice and then you vote" than the "you vote on
each faction and then we negotiate afterwards" of coalition politics.
That still doesn't explain why the voters don't move to some other
party, though. Perhaps the effective barrier to entry is too high.

So to sum all of that up: parties rarely have the opportunity to become
seriously divisive because that's too costly. However, there's some kind
of stickiness that means that they can still move their center of
gravity away from the voters' to some extent, as long as doing so
doesn't cause an uproar right away.

To fix the latter, I would support initiative and referendum, and move
to a more candidate-based election method - perhaps a hybrid of
candidate-wise Double Bucklin and biproportional representation to
ensure party proportionality[1]. Or Schulze's STV-MMP
(http://m-schulze.9mail.de/schulze4.pdf). But fat chance, eh? :-)

OTOH, one of the benefits of representative democracy is supposed to be
that politicians can make short-run unpopular choices as long as they
work in the long run. Making the democratic link stronger and more
immediate risks populism. On the, err, third hand (?), it doesn't seem
to have measurably hurt Switzerland; and the point is more to "unstick"
consistently/long-term unpopular positions from the parties' bundles.

Finally, I'd say that local politics seem to work pretty well. I don't
think that the districts need to be smaller. Another benefit of the
current system is that there's no need to do any gerrymandering or
semi-arbitrary subdivision of natural borders for national elections:
the electoral districts are just the counties and elect different number
of representatives.

[1] Bucklin is one of the few methods (FPTP is another) that's monotone
enough that you can do biproportional representation with it. Though I
suppose you could do it with monotone multiwinner Condorcet methods as
well (if differently), there aren't too many monotone multiwinner
Condorcet methods around. There are even fewer that have a sliding
quota/divisor method style proportionality rather than a Droop quota one.

>> (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

Yes, that is a problem. You can choose between managable ballots (party
list) but let the party decide the list order, or you can have very
large ballots with greater freedom, or you can have small districts with
attendant disproportionality (or weird results if you use biproportional
representation to fix it).

Is there any way of breaking this barrier? The only thing I can think of
is to ask voters to register for a particular party and then have
primaries to decide the list order. (Of course, unregistered voters
should still be able to vote in the PR election, and registered ones
should be able to rank the parties in any order.)

Or you could dissolve the problem: use council democracy, sortition,
direct online balloting with delegable proxy, something else. But that's
uncharted territory.