[EM] Explaining PR

[Brian Olson]

Catching up from a couple weeks ago, I just wanted to add my short- 
short version of explaining Proportional Representation that usually  
gets a good response from people:


A 20% group should get 20% of the seats.

It's pretty easy for people to be agreeable to that. I think in  
general it might be easier for people to be agreeable to goals of  
election reform, and relatively few actually care to analyze the  
mechanics of how it works. If they are interested in the mechanics,  
they usually just want to understand it enough to feel they wouldn't  
be cheated by a mysterious system. Explaining it to the point of, oh  
yeah, that sounds reasonable is often enough.
Depending on the audience, it might even be better to say that a 10%  
group should get 10% of the seats. Many US Green Party people would  
love that.


Another 'goal' statement I like to use:

I want to vote for candidates, not parties.

I think a fair number of people have heard vague ideas about how in  
some places you vote for a party and the party fills in seats with  
people depending on how many they get allocated. I don't trust party  
machines even when it's my party, so I want to vote directly for  
candidates. STV allows this, and I like that (never mind its warts,  
we'll figure out better ways that also allow candidate voting).


Anyway, those are my pithy two bits for the PR debate for now.

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Re: [EM] Explaining PR

[Jonathan Lundell]

On Sep 20, 2009, at 7:49 AM, Brian Olson wrote:

Catching up from a couple weeks ago, I just wanted to add my short- 
short version of explaining Proportional Representation that usually  
gets a good response from people:


A 20% group should get 20% of the seats.


Kathleen Barber has a nice line in her book A Right to Representation:

Proportional representation is a simple principle, derived from  
democratic theory, that in a representative body the share of seats  
won should correspond to the share of votes won. The electoral  
system is thus the link between the preferences of the voters and  
the making of policy. As Ernest Naville wrote in 1865, In a  
democratic government the right of decision belongs to the majority,  
but the right of representation belongs to all.




Brian's line gets at the what of PR; Barber and Naville take a stab  
at why. Raph, I think, was also trying to get at how, specifically  
for STV. They're all useful questions to ask  answer.


Tideman does a nice job, I think, in his recent book and a couple of  
earlier papers, where, in a somewhat longer form, he looks at the  
evolution of STV, beginning with the easy-to-understand method of  
Thomas Hill, and proceeding through several refinements to Meek and  
Tideman's own CPO-STV.


One thing I like about this line of explanation is that the starting  
point is easy to grasp, but it's also easy to grasp its real  
shortcomings, which makes the next refinement in turn easy to  
understand as a means of addressing one or more of the shortcomings.


Unfortunately, I don't think there's a version freely accessible  
online (though I haven't searched Google Books recently).
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