On Jun 21, 2008, at 1:09 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
Hello all,
(says the newcomer.)
Welcome.
First, set that there are n binary issues. Each of the voters then
have an issue profile which consists of n booleans.
How do see the role of parties here? Do you use e.g. a binary
decision between left wing and right wing? Or maybe support or no
support to party P? Or maybe you don't measure party support at all
but just separate binary questions.
However, this presents a problem. How does one aggregate the
difference on each issue into a single score? Is a one-percent
difference on a single issue better than 1/n percent difference on
all issues? One way to solve this is to just settle on an
aggregation measure (like root-mean-square) and hope the results
can be generalized across;
Any opinions on how to treat different levels of importance of
different criteria to the voter (and to the candidates)?
Best of all were the "proper" methods implemented: STV (with
Senatorial rules) and QLTD-PR, which uses Woodall's QLTD instead of
IRV as its basis: it adds fractional votes until someone gets above
the quota, then reweights the voters who contributed to that one,
basing the weighting on the candidate's surplus.
How about traditional party list based multi-winner methods? I find
methods that allow candidates to form a tree like structure (instead
of the typical flat party structure) where different branches reflect
different opinions on different key questions interesting from this
proportionality point of view.
One more observation. Nowadays many methods actually try to meet two
kind of proportionality requirements, political/ideological
proportionality (typically based on the party structure) and regional
proportionality (typically implemented by mandating all to vote at
their own home district for the local candidates there). These
scenarios may be out of the scope of the proposed metric because of
the mandated nature of the regional representation, but regional
proportionality is one interesting and maybe also measurable
criterion for proportionality.
Sorry about being "speculation oriented only" instead of making some
more concrete proposals/claims :-).
Juho
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