David L Wetzell wrote:
On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 3:20 PM, David L Wetzell <wetze...@gmail.com
<mailto:wetze...@gmail.com>> wrote:
Here's a bunch of responses
dlw: SL may be more proportional than LR Hare, but since I'm advocating
for the use of a mix of single-winner and multi-winner election rules, I
have no problems with the former being biased towards bigger parties and
the latter being biased somewhat towards smaller parties. For there's
no need to nail PR if PR itself does not nail what we really want PP,
proportionality in power. This is also part of why I prefer
small-numbered PR rules (less proportional) that increase the no. of
competitive elections and maintain the legislator-constituent relationship.
Proportionality in power is quite well approximated by proportionality
in representation, however. The degree of fit depends on strategy and
coordination: if every member of the assembly votes for himself, it's
near-perfect (within per-issue variance that gets evened out); if
everybody colludes into one or two superparties, then it may diverge
greatly.
At that point, the question is how far you should take PR. From my own
observation, PR as approximation of PP has problems in certain edge
cases (kingmaker parties), but these are rare. Therefore I think that as
long as you patch up the edge cases or make them unlikely - say, by an
explicit threshold or an implicit one such as STV's - you can optimize
for PR within those bounds.
Even if you don't think PR approximates PP, you can use the same
advanced PR method to give seats fairly according to PP instead. Poland
has proposed something like this be done in the Council of the EU, the
proposal saying that each country should have a weight proportional to
the square root of the number of people in the country.
My preference for integrating single-winner and multiwinner (if you're
going to do both in the same context) is then that whatever you decide
to apportion on (power or votes), the single-winner method can take it
into account. It knows about it, and so you play it a bit more safe. If
the multiwinner rule is bad, the single-winner rule can compensate, and
if the single-winner rule is bad, the multiwinner rule can compensate.
If you're risk averse, as you said you might be, that's a good property!
The flipside is that you won't get the optimal result if it turns out
that the real thing you should optimize is whatever either the
single-winner or multiwinner method optimizes. If that is the case, then
the multiwinner or single-winner method (respectively) will only be a
burden and pull you away from your goal.
KM:You might be able to get something more easily understood yet
retaining some of the compensation part of the first version, by
doing something like this: first elect the single winner/s. Then
start STV with the single winner/s marked as elected (and thus with
vote transfers already done).
dlw:The rub here is the desirability of guaranteeing that the Condorcet
winner is elected. In "more local" elections that attract less
attention, I put less emph on the usefulness of rankings and thereby the
Condorcet winner.
The single-winner doesn't *have* to be the CW (although I would prefer
the system to ensure it is). Even if you for some reason thought the
Plurality winner was the best one, and wanted to design the integration
accordingly, you could do STV with the Plurality winner already elected.
dlw: 1. While all forms of PR fall short of proportionality in
representation, the best predictor of proportionality is the number
of contested seats.
KM:The Hix-Johnston-MacLean document states that these effects are
weak. To quote:
"Turnout is usually higher at elections in countries with PR than in
countries without, It also tends to be even higher in PR systems
with smaller multi-member constituencies, and also tends to be
higher where citizens can express preferential votes between
individual politicians from the same political party rather than
simply choosing between pre-ordered party lists. In general, the
more choice electors are offered, the greater the likelihood that
they will turn out and exercise it. However these effects are not
particularly strong, there is some evidence that highly complex
electoral systems suppress turnout, and turnout levels may partly
reflect influences other than the electoral system, for instance in
some countries voting is compulsory."
So I don't think you can necessarily draw that conclusion. The
apparent competitiveness between seats may be lesser (because of
what I mentioned above in that single-member districts are much more
win-all/lose-all), but that doesn't mean the real change in voter
opinion from term to term is any greater in SMD countries.
dlw: I interpret what they're saying is that other factors also come
into play that impact the competitiveness of elections. So my
conclusion could still be"useful", even if it abstracts from a lot of
real-world stuff that also affects voter-turnout. The election rules
that best guarantee proportionality tend to reduce voter interest in
elections, thereby making PR not the key criteria for choosing an
election system.
The whole point is that you can't say that it tends to do so. There are
so many other parameters, and the conclusion could just as well align in
the favor of "more choices is higher turnout", as they themselves say.
If you wanted to make that conclusion rather than yours, you could point
at that PR in the first place gives higher turnout than non-PR; and that
countries with ranked balloting types of PR has higher turnout than
countries with party list, all else held equal. Sure, ranked balloting
type PR tend to have fewer seats, but then the weak "fewer seats -> more
turnout" is a correlation, not a causal relationship.
2. Proportionality in representation does not entail proportionality
in power and the latter is desired more than the former. As such, it
seems that minority dissenters will need to use extra-political
methods (not unlike #OWS) to move the center, regardless of whether
PR or another mixed system is used.
Proportionality in representation is correlated with proportionality
in power. The correlation isn't perfect, as Banzhaf and
Shapley-Shubik's measures make apparent, but to leap on that and
conclude that proportionality isn't proportional... that's unwarranted.
dlw: But it waters down the desirability of nailing PR even further and
opens the door to a greater valuation of other conflicting criteria.
See above. If you think you should optimize proportionality of something
else, feel free to use the fine-honed machinery of PR with a different
target than proportionality in numbers. Use square root laws, dynamic
programming or simulated annealing
(http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.34.6640) to get
proportionality by power (under assumptions of great amounts of
collusion) if you wish. In any case, you'll get that for which you
optimize, instead of a fuzzy perhaps-what-you-want, perhaps-what-you-don't.
KM:If anything, when proportional representation disagrees with
proportionality in power, the power favors the minority parties.
Minor party kingmakers can make themselves costly if they know there
won't be any coalition without them. Hence the presence of
thresholds in most PR systems: these keep too minor parties from
becoming potential kingmakers.
Over here, the threshold of 4% keeps most "swing parties" (as one
may call them) out of power. Yet the threshold is soft - even
parties below 4% of the total vote can get representatives, they
just don't get MMP-esque compensation on the national level. (Our PR
system is a bit unusual in this respect: parties get additional
seats if their per-region seats reflect their national share of the
vote too badly.) Perhaps you'd want a hard threshold for a less
homogenous country, but my point is that the problem can be managed.
dlw: Since PR->PP, we deny PR. My wider point is that American forms of
PR takes a different approach to the problem, one that presumes both PR
and single-seat elections are in use so that as long as the latter
favors bigger parties, PR may be biased somewhat in favor of smaller
parties.
I don't know what you mean by "PR->PP". "PR leads to proportionality of
power"? Anyway, if the inaccuracy in PR wrt proportionality of power
favors the small parties, there's the small-party bias you want. Use it,
then integrate your single-winner method with the PR so that if you
against expectations are wrong, the method can still work.
dlwThese seem to imply that we need not strive for proportionality
in representation as the gold standard for electoral reform. If the
two major parties, with a somewhat disproportionate amount of
representation, are more dynamic then they'd tend to represent well
the majority of the population and heed minorities that frame their
issues respectfully.
KM:Do note, though, that the same Lijphart as you referenced on your
page, said:
"If partisan conflict is multidimensional, a two-party system must
be regarded as an electoral straitjacket that can hardly be regarded
as democratically superior to a multiparty system reflecting all the
major issue dimensions." ("Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and
Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries", 1984, page 114.)
dlw:What if there's a dialectic between multi-dimensionality and
single-dimensionality that gets worked out in an ongoing process? If so
then a 2-party system isn't so bad if it need not be the same two
parties de jure and de facto and the two major parties together serve as
melding(not melting) pot with significant inputs from dissenters/third
parties who raise up new dimensions of conflict into our political
systems that lead to a repositioning of the de facto two major parties.
I'd imagine Lijphart knows that parties are not static fixed-in-stone
things. Beyond this, I don't know what arguments Lijphart employed.
Myself, I would say that the difference is like that of a proposal to
use market pricing in a corporation versus doing logistics calculations
directly: the first gets there in a slower, more roundabout way; the
latter goes right to what is needed.
Of course, since I'm not Lijphart, I'm not the same kind of authority
and so you could counter more easily. But also note that Lijphart is in
favor of multiparty democracy for other reasons, too. To quote Wikipedia
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arend_Lijphart#Major_works ):
"While Lijphart advocated consociationalism primarily for societies
deeply divided along ethnic, religious, ideological, or other cleavages,
he sees consensus democracy as appropriate for any society. In contrast
to majoritarian democracies, consensus democracies have multiparty
systems, parliamentarism with oversized (and therefore inclusive)
cabinet coalitions, proportional electoral systems, corporatist
(hierarchical) interest group structures, federal structures,
bicameralism, rigid constitutions protected by judicial review, and
independent central banks. These institutions ensure, firstly, that only
a broad supermajority can control policy and, secondly, that once a
coalition takes power, its ability to infringe on minority rights is
limited."
Now you could say that "it'll be different". Okay, but then your
particular construction would have to give significantly different
outcomes than the range of majoritarian democracies that Lijphart studied.
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