Re: [Election-Methods] Measuring power in a multi winner election
On Sep 24, 2007, at 23:03 , Howard Swerdfeger wrote: One alternative approach would be to require higher percentage of votes in some cases, e.g. after decisions have been made with lower percentages for few times. In this case 30%+30% would not be enough any more in some cases but the the approval limit would go up from 50% e.g. to 65% at some point. Good point, I ran my numbers with a threshold of 50% of the seats, rounded up. the threshold could be altered, and it is unknown how this would effect the power index. My guess would be that as the threshold was raised to 100% of the seats it would Slowly equalize the power between the parties. One more approach would be to give the parties some veto votes that they can use as they wish during the period between elections. If some party in on the losing side in some vote by 5% margin it could still veto and use 5 of its veto votes to do that (maybe all losing parties would use some of their veto votes). Juho ___ Copy addresses and emails from any email account to Yahoo! Mail - quick, easy and free. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/trueswitch2.html Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [Election-Methods] Measuring power in a multi winner election
Howard Swerdfeger wrote: |-|--||-| | YEAR | PropRep | PropPower | System | |-|--||-| | 1993 | 18.3| 54.0 | FPTP | | 1996 | 6.0| 10.2 | MMP | | 1999 | 4.7| 12.2 | MMP | | 2002 | 3.9| 24.2 | MMP | | 2005 | 1.3| 16.4 | MMP | |-|--||-| In all cases lower numbers are Better or more proportional. as the number is actually a measure of Dis-proportionality. Sorry if this was not clear in my first email Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [Election-Methods] Measuring power in a multi winner election
At 11:22 AM 9/21/2007, Howard Swerdfeger wrote: The drive behind thes moves it usually that the old system fails to translate votes into seats fairly. (Votes != Seats) If we want to understand fair proportional representation, we must look back to the principle of representation itself, and to pure representation, which does not involve elections, except in the most basic technical sense. If we have an assembly at which all members of a society may attend and vote, and if every eligible voter actually attends and participates, we have a pure and complete democracy. Unfortunately, as scale increases, and even on a small scale in common situations, this goal is impossible to attain, because there are differing abilities of members to actually attend a meeting and devote the necessary time to the issues. So even Town Meeting government, as we have in New England in many small towns, fails in certain respects. Town Meeting in the small town where I lived for some years often had trouble finding a quorum for meetings, and the quorum was five percent of town members. However, it still worked reasonably well, because town government tended to operate seeking consensus. These were neighbors and friends, and the people who actually attended Town Meeting were, informally, representing many of those who could not. But not all, and not proportionally, which we could see clearly in some situations. Massachusetts law requires secret ballot votes, at the regular polls, for tax overrides. It is fairly common for a tax override to be approved by Town Meeting and to fail at the polls. Obviously, Town Meeting is not accurately representing (or shaping, same thing) Town opinion. We can presume that most people active in Town Meeting also vote at the polls, but then there are many more who vote in the polls but who don't attend Town Meeting (perhaps larger by a factor of ten or so). So, in order for everyone to be represented in an assembly, we need some kind of representation. There are two basic forms, and the difference between them is so drastic that it is a wonder to me that we have the one, in political practice, supposedly in democracies, when, in situations where people have free choice, they would never pick it! But, to my knowledge, for governmental applications, we have never been offered that choice, and, where we might have been able to implement it -- as with Town government in New England -- the idea seems to have never even occurred. The two systems are, of course, elected representatives by some scheme, for better or worse, or chosen representatives. A choice is an election which is why I will acknowledge that proxies are elected, but it is not a contested election. That is, the voter has the absolute right to choose anyone as representative, or to participate personally. This is the *norm* in business! But it is *never* done in politics! Part of my task is to ask the obvious question, as with the emperor wearing no clothes: Why? I do have pieces of the answer, but it is an open question. Much of it is simply history. Our present governmental systems, in democracies, evolved from undemocratic forms, with a gradual extension of freedom coming down from the top. That is, a collection of feudal lords were able to demand rights from the sovereign whom they chose to govern the overall society. But they were a small group, and they had no need for proxy representation. (But note that in some assemblies, even governmental ones, such as in New York, members can vote by proxy in some situations, I think committee votes can be by proxy. And there are moves to attempt to limit this, it being considered an abuse, and if a proxy vote is merely an absentee vote, I agree. The systems I propose do not necessarily allow directed votes; rather, the proxy simply votes, and those represented are considered to have voted in the same way, unless they intervene and vote directly.) Proxy democracy creates a perfect PR assembly, practically by definition, but it is not, generally, a peer assembly. There is a variant which, with a sufficient district size -- particular an election district which is the entire jurisdiction -- is usable with secret ballot, and which creates *almost* perfect proportional representation. Note that I say proportional representation, not proportional voting. However, when we have party-based PR, and we assume party-line voting, then voting power and representation are essentially the same thing. But the key to understanding PR is not voting power, per se, but rather moves two tumblers: (1) representation in deliberation, and (2) representation in voting. One of the realizations I came across in this study was that the two were separable and have different requirements. One of the reasons that direct democracy has been considered impossible to scale has been that the two were not separated. Direct participation in deliberation is
[Election-Methods] Measuring power in a multi winner election
I know that this list is primarily single winner elections but I thought given the low volume as of late a slight change of topic would be welcome. with that, I was wondering about multi winner elections. specifically the parliamentary kind typical of most former British colonies. Do to the inadequacies of the FPTP system in creating a government many of these countries are looking at alternative systems, New Zealand moved to MMP, Scotland as well, BC tried to once, and will try again move to STV, Ontario is looking at MMP. The drive behind thes moves it usually that the old system fails to translate votes into seats fairly. (Votes != Seats) but most of these reforms fail to recognize that that Seats do not equal power. So we are still still stuck with a similar problem (votes != power) I was looking into 2 methods of measuring power in a weighted voting system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banzhaf_Power_Index http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapley-Shubik_power_index I was wondering first if there are any methods of measuring power in a legislature that I am unaware of? Secondly if anybody has tried to design a generic system where by votes are kept proportional to power, via allocation of seats? Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [Election-Methods] Measuring power in a multi winner election
Some random observations on the theme. Seats != power seems to assume that there is a hard party discipline (=all party representatives will/must vote as told by the party). Or alternatively representatives could have different weights (different number of votes each). You skipped the normal rule of proportional systems where votes = seats quite quickly. It has its problems but I guess also possible power measurement based methods would have some problems. Let's say there is a rule that one can modify the constitution with 75% of the votes. There are three parties: 45%, 45% and 10%. Should we now give the smallest party more power by allowing it to modify the constitution together with one large party in some cases (with only 55% of the votes)? With 50% limit and parties 30%, 30%, 30%, 10%, should we allow minority decisions in some cases to allow the small party to decide in some cases? One alternative approach would be to require higher percentage of votes in some cases, e.g. after decisions have been made with lower percentages for few times. In this case 30%+30% would not be enough any more in some cases but the the approval limit would go up from 50% e.g. to 65% at some point. Note that if the parties will make majority decisions that then require all the party representatives to vote as decided this means that some of the party representatives may have to vote against their will. The party is allowed to wield power but part of the representatives will wild the power against themselves. The party has power but the representatives and supporters would in some cases be hurt by this power (maybe the alternative that lost had majority support among (all) the representatives and voters). The party won but maybe not all of its representatives and supporters. I guess the basic idea behind party discipline is that this way the party is able to reach a better negotiation position. A party that is internally split 50%-50% on some question can still do horse trading and agree with some other party to support that party in this vote if that party will support this this party in some future vote. The power of the parties now follows the power measurement schemes instead of votes = power. But in principle parties that together have sufficient majority may take a dictator role. It is hard to design systems that would eliminate the possibility of this kind of party negotiation level voting discipline (if one party can do this, why not a group of parties too). Voting methods that would take the power measurement aspects into account may give more power to the small parties in order to allow them to decide more than they would otherwise be allowed to. This could lead to a strategic for the big parties to split at least formally but still after the elections use strong party discipline that would now cover all the party fragments. How about using the more traditional votes = seats method and discouraging the use of the party discipline? That could be just a recommendation, or maybe a rule that would ban disciplinary actions towards representatives that have voted against the party majority opinion. One approach would be to introduce more structure in the party structure. I have few times promoted the idea of allowing a tree like structure within the parties (and between them too). That would make it easier to the right or green wing of a party to vote differently than the rest of the party (they could feel close to being required to do so in some right or green situations). Also methods that do not rely on the party structure (e.g. STV) are more likely to lead to a having representatives that will make independent decisions, maybe sometimes working together with other right wing representatives, sometimes together with other greenish representatives etc. I'm not aware of methods that would take some of the power measurement formula into account. I welcome multi-winner discussions. No need and no reason to limit the discussions to the single-winner theme. (What would be the reason to do so? Often single-winner and multi-winner systems are alternatives to each others = both needed to cover the field properly.) Juho On Sep 21, 2007, at 18:22 , Howard Swerdfeger wrote: I know that this list is primarily single winner elections but I thought given the low volume as of late a slight change of topic would be welcome. with that, I was wondering about multi winner elections. specifically the parliamentary kind typical of most former British colonies. Do to the inadequacies of the FPTP system in creating a government many of these countries are looking at alternative systems, New Zealand moved to MMP, Scotland as well, BC tried to once, and will try again move to STV, Ontario is looking at MMP. The drive behind thes moves it usually that the old system fails to translate votes
