On 2004-01-06, James Gilmour uttered: >And we here in the UK already know that virtual districts are not worth a >second thought, at least, not here. [...] Locality and community are very >important.
I agree, but for a different reason. If we impose democratic rule on a group of people, we're essentially socialising some set of decisions. When we pick an election method, we're essentially *defining* "the will of the people" for this group. Now, if we only analyse the election method in isolation, we're missing any game theoretical phenomena which vary based on the underlying demos. Those phenomena are usually the real worry of proportionality and representation enthusiasts. For instance, geographic representation thru districting is essentially an attempt to fix the perverse incentives created when the demos includes people from far away which have no stake in local matters. No districting rule or election method can ever solve all such conflicts of interest simultaneously, because the latter are several from the mechanics of the election. Rather the problem is caused by the fact that the demos was chosen badly -- it fails to include people who are affected by its decisions, includes people who have no incentive to vote rationally, or is simply so torn apart by individual interests that no election method can possibly unearth a collective consensus. Or it might not even be possible to structure the political surroundings of the election such that people have an incentive to vote sincerely. In groups like these, no definition of the "will of the people" works, so all collective choice can actually fail to unearth people's preferences. (E.g. if people have reasons separate from the election method to consistently vote insincerely. Secret ballots are an attempt to alleviate one such problem.) At the very worst all election methods might deliver sane, persuasive, profoundly irrational collective preferences. (E.g. the tragedy of the commons: everybody votes sincerely against the collective good.) In other words, not all decisions can or should be socialised. These problems are not really in the realm of social choice theory, but have to do with wider political science and economics. Talking about them purely in the context of election methods or the concrete mechanics of elections just isn't enough. And since the problem isn't in the election method, trying to fix the method will in this case only make it worse. For instance, geographical representation will seriously hurt other kinds of representation (say, along party lines), so it can severely distort decisions in non-geographically determined questions. In this case the best fix is clearly to decide local matters locally, not districting. Even worse, all that virtual districting would do would be to turn the whole system into a pure plurality one or give a whole new meaning to gerrymandering, depending on whether people were allowed to choose their own districts. -- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2 ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
