On Jul 8, 2006, at 9:26 AM, James Gilmour wrote:
Single member districts still have some benefits. They're well understood. The practice of having a local representative who interacts with constituents is well established. And I think that some issues really do still have a local or regional basis which makes sense to take account of by geographic representation. They're easy. To have meaningful PR we need at least 5 seats per election? To do this we can either merge districts in sets of 5 or grow the size of the legislative body (by up to 5 times its current size). Some legislatures and many districts are already too large. But I guess both of those don't often happen in the same place so maybe by choosing one or the other growth it could be made to work acceptably. By splitting the representation methods, having a fully at-large undistricted PR body and an anti-gerrymandered local representation districted body, I think both representation styles are covered and there isn't a need to hybridize them. Perhaps part of the problem with districts is that it needs to be made clear to representatives that it is their duty to represent _everyone_ in their district and not just the people who voted for them. |
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