It is sometimes asserted in various places (including, occasionally, this forum) that PR promotes extremism and single member districts (SMD) promote moderation. There's no denying that PR would give representation to small extremist factions. But small extremist factions would still have small caucuses while large centrist groups would have large caucuses.
Let's look at a case where SMD may actually contribute to extremism: California. After the 2000 census the 53 Congressional districts were drawn to favor incumbents with the sole exception of Gary Condit's district (for the obvious reason that he was an even bigger embarassment than Bob Dornan, if that's possible), and the only spoil taken by the Democrats was that the new Congressional seat was gerrymandered to elect a Democrat. In the state legislature, most of the seats are also safe for their incumbents. The result of this incumbent protection is that legislative elections are now decided in the party primaries. Party loyalists are of course more extreme than the rest of us. The CA legislature seems to have a lot of incredibly liberal Democrats devoted to fulfilling every bad stereotype ever associated with liberals, and the state Republican party is so dysfunctional that their strongest candidate is the guy who gave us "True Lies" and "Kindergarten Cop." The only thing stupider than a liberal is a California Republican. If we had PR, and we were liberated from the tyranny of the party loyalists, a centrist party with a name like "People Better Than Gray Davis and Dana Rohrabacher" could probably capture 30% of the vote. Now, one could make a good argument that we might achieve moderation by drawing legislative districts with the goal of ensuring competition. But given a choice between trusting the political process to sages with maps and census data, or trusting the common sense of my fellow citizens, I'll take Joe Voter over sages with maps. Responses? Alex ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
