On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 4:36 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm < km_el...@lavabit.com> wrote:
> On 05/27/2013 09:19 PM, David L Wetzell wrote: > >> Smith's >> http://rangevoting.org/**PuzzIgnoredInfo.html<http://rangevoting.org/PuzzIgnoredInfo.html> >> >> needs to be taken w. a grain of salt. >> >> The short-comings of IRV depend on the likely number of serious >> candidates whose a priori odds of winning, before one assigns >> voter-utilities, are strong. If real life important single-winner >> political elections have economies of scale in running a serious >> election then it's reasonable to expect only 1, 2 or 3 (maybe 4 once in >> a blue moon) candidates to have a priori, no matter what election rule >> gets used, serious chance to win, while the others are at best trying to >> move the center on their key issues and at worse potential spoilers in a >> fptp election. >> > > That argument is too strong in the sense that it can easily be modified to > lead to any conclusion you might wish. And it can be modified thus because > it is too vague. > Hi Karl, good to hear from you again. I doubt economies of scale args are completely flexible and the evidence need not be as rigorously presented when one is initially communicating ideas. > > Let me be more precise. You may claim that if there're some economies of > scale, then it's reasonable to only expect 1, 2 or 3 viable candidates. But > here's a problem. Without any data, you can posit that the economies of > scale kick in at just the right point to make 2.5-party rule inevitable > even under Condorcet, say. But without any data, I could just as well posit > that the economies of scale, if any, kick in at n = 1000; or, I could claim > that the economies of scale kick in at n = 2 and thus we don't need > anything more than Plurality in the first place[1]. > No, because non-competitive candidates still serve a useful purpose even if their odds of winning are low. And a non-plurality election is harder to game, as illustrated by the GOP's 40-yr use of a nixonian- Southern Strategy of pitting poor whites against minorities when outsiders are given voice to reframe wedge issues that tilt the de facto center away from the true political center. > So one may claim that "important single-winner political elections" > necessarily have economies to scale that make anything beyond 2.5-party > rule exceedingly unlikely. But without data, that's claim isn't worth > anything. And without data that can't be explained as confusing > P(multipartyism) with P(multipartyism | political dynamics given by > Plurality), the simpler hypothesis, namely that there is no such barrier > that we know of, holds by default. > How about economics? There exists X a cost of running a competitive campaign. There exists Y a reward, not per se all economic, for winning a campaign. There exists P a probability of winning. P is roughly inversely proportional to the number of competitive candidates, albeit less for the last candidate to decide to compete. If there exists N likely competitive candidates then if the calculation is k*Y/(N+1)<X holds, w. k<1, for the N+1 candidate, who then chooses not to run, it implies that N>(kY-X)/X. A better election rule might increase k some, but arguably X will also tend to be higher for the less well-known candidate, regardless of the election rule used. So I agree that the average number of competittive candidates can be increased by the use of a different single-winner election rule, but with limits due to the other aspects of running an election and how a single-winner election tends to discourage too many from putting a lot into running for the office. > And, if you're not claiming that there is such economics of scale, but > simply that there *might* be, then it's still less risky to assume > multipartyism is right and use an advanced method. If we're wrong, nothing > lost but "momentum". If we're right, we avoid getting stuck at something > that would still seriously misrepresent the wishes of the people. > Well, I am claiming there exists inherent economies of scale in single-winner elections such that the number of competitive candidates are likely to have a fuzzy ceiling apart from the specific election rule used, and that single-partyism/multipartyism is a function of the mix of single-winner and fair multi-winner election rules used. My implication of the first is that it relativizes the import of alternative single-winner election rules for political elections and thereby elevates the import of marketing/first-mover advantage in the replacement of FPTP. > > (I'd claim, based on (among other things) international data under Runoff, > that there's little evidence that multipartyism is inherently incompatible > with single-winner rules in general. But such data can easily be specially > pled away by making the rules about what counts circuitous enough. So if > I'm going to go in that direction, I'd like to have some idea of, before > the fact, what kind of evidence will convince and what will not.) > It wd also involve stuff like a parliamentarian vs presidential system. In a presidential system, particularly w. a stronger president, the presidential elections tend to build up the two biggest parties at the expense of smaller parties. But such a system could also lead to one-party domination with no clear competitor/replacement for the dominant party so that the system wd seem to be a multi-party system. In the US, we are heading towards a one-party dominated system and the GOP civil war shows how the alliances they have relied on are becoming dysfunctional for key nat'l elections. > > [1] Possibly with stricter rules to entry so that insignificant third > parties don't spoil the elections. Adding such rules, e.g. requiring more > signatures for candidates to run, would be a lot simpler and less expensive > to implement than switching to IRV. > Once more, small third parties can serve a function even if they are not likely to get their candidaate elected. If one adds to their activism a commitment to MLK-jr/Gandhi-like activism apart from elections proper then there is the capacity to move the center. Having their candidate get more respect and air-time during the election is icing on the pre-existing non-political/cultural tools available to them. dlw
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