[EM] An unusual "absolving" PR method

[Etjon Basha]

Good evening Kristofer,

I've played with basically the same system myself, though I go with
quadratic voting at the individual level in the name of countability.

Anyway, i don't think there'd be anything stopping the rush to the centre
here: parties would just have their national profile set at whichever
ideological equilibrium they need to tend to by nation-wide spots or
polemic, and have the local candidates rush one over the other to say
"well, the boys at central are a bit rough, but their heart is in the right
place. We'll find reasonable solutions here".

Regards,

On Fri, 12 Dec 2025, 10:42 pm Kristofer Munsterhjelm via Election-Methods, <
election-methods at lists.electorama.com> wrote:

> Some methods are algorithmically simple by making the voters or
> candidates do their work instead. For instance, Approval gets some of
> its simplicity by telling the voters to figure out where to put their
> cutoff. Let's say that such a method "absolves itself" of work that
> other methods do (and the back-end complexity that arises as a
> consequence).
>
> In that vein, here is one such PR method with parties: Voters rank party
> candidates. An order of finish is computed using a majoritarian method,
> say ranked pairs. Separately, each voter's ballot is counted as a vote
> for whatever party their favorite candidate belongs to, like in ordinary
> party list.
>
> Then the method uses some well-known party list method (say Sainte-Laguë
> with Pukelsheim's method) to determine the number of winners per party
> per district. These winners get filled up with candidates in the order
> of the district's order of finish.
>
> For instance, if district A's order of finish is
> R1>G1>B3>R2>G2>R3>G3>B2>B1 and the party list calculation gives the
> district two seats to R and G each and one seat to B, then the
> allocation is:
>
> Red: R1, R2
> Green: G1, G2
> Blue: B3
>
> Now, all else equal, you'd expect these seats to be filled up with
> centrists since we're using a majoritarian method and candidates closer
> to the median voter are preferred by it. But here's the "absolution":
> the parties are motivated to retain their distinct identities. Knowing
> that centrists will be elected, but that the party list component is
> based on favorites, they may simply not nominate candidates who are too
> centrist, because they're going to win the seat anyway and they don't
> want to dilute their ideological position.
>
> However, there is a tension to this reasoning. If they nominate a bounch
> of extremists, then that will put voters off voting for them and they
> lose first preferences. The parties thus have to find a balance between
> not running too centrist candidates (who won't have an ideological base
> in the party itself) and candidates who are too far into the wings.
>
> In practice, this might just turn into ordinary party list PR, because
> the tension that "if we run too extreme candidates, people won't vote
> for us" also applies to ordinary party list. What it would do is keep
> parties from fielding candidates beloved by the leadership but not the
> people, as the outcome ordering would force these candidates to the back
> and they wouldn't be elected -- unless everybody else on the list is worse.
>
> -km
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