Steve Eppley writes: > Under IRR, on the other hand, parties would not have > a strong incentive to nominate only one candidate, > and there'd be strong incentives to nominate more than > one: they could increase turnout of their supporters > on election day by nominating a diversity, they could > avoid the fratricide of primary fights, and they could > avoid putting all their eggs in one basket.
I have doubts about that, Steve. Nominating more than one candidate would mean splitting the available campaign funding, plus it would make it more difficult for voters to become familiar with all the different candidates and decide which ones they prefer and in what order. Any voting method or other decision procedure must take into account the burdens it would place on voters or people involved in a carrying out a decision procedure. That's a problem most advocates of direct democracy have failed to address at all adequately. > Democracy is not about being fair to each > voter, as one member of this list recently asserted > during our discussion of the electoral college; it's > about aligning the incentives of society's leaders > with the well-being of the people. That's debatable as well. Democracy has always been understood as a general means for making decisions that affect everyone in a particular group or organization or polity. Alternatives to democracy (rule by the people) are anarchy (rule by no one), monarchy (rule by one individual), oligarchy (rule by a politically privileged group of people), plutocracy (rule by the wealthy), aristocracy (rule by hereditary elites), and majority tyranny (rule by majorities with no minority rights). Other alternatives that have been proposed by political philosphers are polyarchy (Robert Dahl's term for rule by multiple interest groups engaged in complex patterns of competition and cooperation) and demarchy (John Burnheim's term for a system in which collective decisions of all kinds are made by many groups of different and in most cases specialized kinds that are chosen by random selection from among citizens.) My preferred definition of democracy is "rule by all of the people," which requires (ideally, at least) that all people have equal collective decisionmaking power, or equal power to participate and determine the outcome of collective decisions about matters they care about and that affect them. But no definition can do more than provide very rough guidelines about how decisions are to be made. The "devil is in the details" with regard to both democracy and all of its alternatives. I suspect some forms of oligarchy or even monarchy would do a better job than some forms of democracy of "aligning the incentives of society's leaders with the well-being of the people." My own strong opinion is that good forms of democracy would do much better than any of democracy's alternatives but that no nation (and in particular, not the U.S.) has yet come close to adopting or creating the best possible democratic procedures and institutions. Better voting methods would contribute a lot, but they are far from all that is needed, and perhaps not what are most important. That is, better voting methods are, at most, necessary for improving democracy but far from sufficient. -Ralph Suter ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
