On Aug 18, 2008, at 12:00 , James Gilmour wrote:
I have to say I just do not understand the obsession with "lists".
Lists are indeed rather clumsy and maybe simplifying (trees would be
more expressive though :-).
If looking for some rationale behind lists one could say that some
groupings according to ideological differences are natural. Having
such explicit structures may help the voters understand better the
political landscape. On the other hand these same structures could
exist in posters too even if the election itself would be carried out
without any reference to these political groupings. Such poster based
declarations of affiliation could also influence the behaviour of the
elected representatives later. Explicit lists/trees make this however
more concrete (and more binding to the elected candidates).
Lists and trees offer a nice set-up for those voters that do not
regularly follow politics and want to spend only few minutes to
decide how to vote. This kind of an easy structure might also
increase the level of participation in the elections. If we want to
offer the candidates also the opportunity to freely rank all the
candidates I'd be interested in this case to offer a simple, e.g.
tree like structure to the voters as a default structure and order of
inheritance. More complex inheritance order describing ballots would
be allowed too for voters that want to express their preferences in
some other way than in line with the candidate given (maybe
simplified) preference order that is available in the tree structure.
Juho
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