Single-seat districts (the usual ones) provide very tight regional
representation / proportionality. Political proportionality on the
other hand is very poor.
Multi-member districts provide less strict regional proportionality
but better political proportionality.
The number of seats per district is important. If one district has 5
seats and another has 10 seats the chances of small groups to get
their candidates elected is different. The number of seats sets a
limit on the size of the parties that they must reach to get their
first seat (the case with one seat only is an extreme case that
typically favours two large parties with about 50% support each).
In Finland there is currently one electoral reform proposal (with
support of majority of the parties) under discussion. The current
proposal gets rid of the current calculation rules that threat
different size districts differently. The basic idea is that the
number of representatives that each party will get will be counted
first at national level, and then the seats will be distributed to
the districts so that both political and regional proportionality
requirements will be met.
In the proposed system votes of a small group will thus be summed up
at national level. Even if the votes at some district would not be
enough to get even one seat the sum of votes in several districts may
be enough to guarantee one seat (that will be allocated to that group
in one of the districts).
(The proposed system contains currently also a general threshold
level that parties need to reach to get any seats, but that's another
story.)
The system is not STV based but open party list based, so it is quite
straight forward to sum up the votes of candidates of each opinion
group although the candidates are different at different districts.
It is thus possible to implement both regional and political
proportionality at the same time. And that is possible even if the
voters (of small parties/groupings) would be "forced" to vote
candidates of their own district.
Juho
On May 18, 2008, at 20:00 , Jonathan Lundell wrote:
On May 18, 2008, at 9:05 AM, Fred Gohlke wrote:
re: "Political proportionality is the one that people most often
discuss since the election methods/systems typically provide
regional proportional automatically (e.g. in the form of single
seat districts and forcing all voters to vote at their home
region, without asking about the opinion of the voter)."
Should I infer that there is a basis for opposing regional
proportionality? I ask because it never occurred to me to
question the wisdom of "forcing all voters to vote at their home
region". Indeed, even the idea of "force" never occurred to me.
I am of the opinion that voting is a right and that one's home
region is the most logical place to exercise that right.
The objection is to "spending" all of our opportunity for
proportionality on regional proportionality; we're looking at the
fundamental argument for PR.
J S Mill makes the case better than I can: http://
etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/m/mill/john_stuart/m645r/
chapter7.html [John Stuart Mill: "Of True and False Democracy;
Representation of All, and Representation of the Majority only",
Chapter 7 of Considerations on Representative Democracy (1861)]
But of course I'll take my own shot at it, through example.
California has an 80-seat state assembly, with 80 somewhat
gerrymandered single-seat districts. Ignoring the subtleties of
quotas and the mathematics of PR, let's say for convenience that
each seat represents 1/80 of the voters of the state. As a voter,
I'd like to be able to form a voting coalition with enough like-
minded voters to elect a representative. Depending on how strongly
I feel about which issues, how likely is it that I'll find enough
like-minded voters within my district to send a representative to
Sacramento? Not very likely, unless my some stroke of luck my
interests happen to be aligned with the major party with a
(probably gerrymandered) majority in my district.
A Republican voter in San Francisco has no chance of direct
representation in Sacramento, nor does a Democrat in Redding. Nor
does a Green or Libertarian anywhere in the state, even though both
parties have in aggregate enough members to justify 1/80 seats.
A typical STV proposal for the California assembly has multimember
districts of 5-10 seats, preserving a degree of geographic locality
at the expense of raising the threshold for minority coalitions.
Notice, though, that if the state were treated as a single 80-seat
district, there'd be nothing under an STV system to prevent voters
from forming geographically (vs party or issue) based coalitions.
The difference with that these geographic coalitions become
voluntary, based on common geographically based interests; they're
not imposed (forced) on the voters by the district system.
So, "forced" in that respect.
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