Question to Kristofer
do you see the "issues" that you start off with as orthogonal?
i.e. do you see this only working in a world where the issues polled are
independent.
also, how it would be decided what issues are polled? even in a
simulation this is important.
Ultimately there are a large election there are wide variety of issues
and it is impossible for any one candidate or voter to be aware of all
of them much less have an opinion on them all.
I think the generalization you propose below to a range of values is
probably worth while.
it might then also be able to address not only proportionality on views
of the legislature, but also proportionality on the thrust of the
legislature.
i.e. it is all well and good to say you are for some position but if the
legislature never proposes a new law or regulation around this position
it is of little use to the people.
Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
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.
Parties aren't explicitly included. Implicitly and ideally, a party would
be a vector quantization center in issue-space, which is to say, a
provider of a popular combined platform. In reality, parties aren't
perfect and face distortions both because of their own nature and
because of the dynamics of the environment in which they exist.
The latter should be well known to list readers - one dynamics
example is that of Duverger's law. Another would be the median voter
theorem for what election method is being used. I think Warren Smith
argued that any preferential election method would produce a 2:3:2
ratio on a one-dimensional political spectrum - one major party and two
lesser ones - but I can't verify that.
But to get back to the question: The binary issues are issues. Parties
present issue-bundles and therefore don't relate to the model. As such,
the model is more simple than reality, but not enough to invalidate it.
In an approval-type scenario, some of the binary issues could be
support/no support (as you say) above pure issue-agreement, but since
Hamming distance measures all differences equally, that means party
loyalty is the same for all parties with regard to all other parties. It's
better, I think, to just leave the parties as issue-bundles.
Any opinions on how to treat different levels of importance of
different criteria to the voter (and to the candidates)?
There are two questions here. I'm not sure which you mean, so I'll
answer them both.
The first is how much inter-issue differences matter in contrast to
intra-issue differences. To take an individual example, consider a
picky people that isn't bothered if the assembly is slightly disproportionate
on any issue, but finds the assembly unworthy if it errs very much
on a single issue. This is the matter which changes based on what
error measure is used. I don't know which error measure is closest
to reality, so in keeping with the simple nature of the model, I used
RMSE. One could argue in favor of, and use, absolute error, the
Sainte-Lague index, Gini, or many others.
The second is of how to handle the case where some issues are
unimportant to a voter. A simple extension to the binary issue profiles
would be a ternary profile: 1 for agree, -1 for disagree, and 0 for no
opinion. Then one could count the discrepancy of assembly and
people on each issue, taking only into account those who have an
opinion (in either assembly or among the people), kind of like the
"no opinion" score in Range. But what does it mean for an assembly
to have no opinion on a single issue? Directly speaking, it means that
they don't consider the issue, it takes no part in the deliberation. But
how does one compare the "error" of the assembly with regards to
the people in that case? I don't have an answer to that, so I didn't
implement it. (Perhaps it'd count maximally, since both those in
favor and against would be unhappy? Perhaps it'd count as if it was
50%, assuming the assembly members would make decisions that
impact this issue randomly, half the time in support by coincidence,
and half the time against it by coincidence...)
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.
Party list needs parties, and there's also the question of open versus
closed list. Both open and closed list have to have a list in the first
place, and the nature of that list is complex, often shaped by the
interplay of power within the party.
But perhaps parties could be added by having a "preround" where
one runs k-means clustering (vector quantization codebook
generation) to find the best party platforms, and then create lists
based on distance from that platform, where voters vote on the
list according to the platform's distance from their own views.
That would be complex, but yes, interesting. Such a party model
would also support simulations of "voting above the line" and MMP,
but again I'm not sure whether the results would be close enough
to reality to be any good.
What do you mean by "methods that allow candidates to form a
tree like structure"? Something like delegable proxy, or just
preference ballots with parties instead of candidates? Or
nontraditional nested democracy (groups elect members to an
assembly - groups of assemblies elect members to a second-
level assembly, onwards up to global issues)?
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.
That sounds like MMP (vote for party, and vote for local candidates).
It's out of scope of the metric itself, as I envisioned it being used to
find out which party-neutral election method would be the best.
If we assume that the mixed-member proportional method uses local
lists for the party-list aspect of the method, then the regional
disproportionality is independent of the constituency outcome, since
whatever the constituency outcome, the seats of a constituency are
only contested by candidates within the region in question. Thus the
strict regional proportionality would be decided by the party-list aspect,
such as by rounding error interactions between region size and
nationwide party support.
Still, one could imagine a less "artificial" geographical representation
metric. Make a density map of the candidates, and then one of the
electorate. Normalize both, and the more similar the maps are to each
other, the better. Or, for each voter, add the distance between him and
the closest elected candidate, and the lower the sum, the better. For
the metric to have anything to measure, the voter would either have to
directly prefer local candidates (by how much?) or the election method
knows where the various voters and candidates live.
In general, it seems like MMP-type systems are methods where
voters don't just vote on candidates, but also on properties. These can
be party (in traditional MMP), or location (in the odd hypothetical
"knows where the voters live" method of the previous paragraph).
But this reply is getting long and I'm offtopic, so I'll end here. I tend
to answer speculation with speculation :-)
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