At 06:25 AM 5/27/2005, James Gilmour wrote:
Those
steeped in social choice theory believe that the purpose of a voting
system should be to maximise representation of
consensus among the electors. But there is a much older view: that the
purpose of a voting system should be to maximise
representation of the diversity among the electors.
Those two goals could support each other. However, many voting systems
accomplish neither purpose.
The goals are compatible because the best way to ensure the widest
consensus is to have as many players at the table as possible. You may
increase meeting efficiency by excluding minority factions, but at the cost
of potentially excluding them in deliberations toward consensus.
Proportional Representation, of course, advances the diversity position,
but also is based on a party system. Unless, of course, voting becomes
proportional rather than number of members. I.e., proxy representation. And
Delegable Proxy makes the concentration of proxies into a council or
working group almost automatic. The idea is to reduce meeting size to the
ideal. What that ideal is, again, would depend on the nature of the
organization.
One point to be realized is that a 20-member council with delegable proxy
would be far more diverse than one with, say PR. This is because a few
proxies would likely hold many votes, and thus proxy-holders with many
fewer votes might still qualify for the council. In other words, a
20-member council would likely have members on it representing much less
than 1% of the electorate. But I don't think we can predict the results.
Delegable Proxy could fail if introduced prematurely into a highly
polarized election process, and where people have no expectation of being
able to personally communicate with their proxy. What would happen here is
that people would give their proxy to highly-visible, media-savvy
candidates, who would then have great power. The problem is that we don't
really know those people! This is why delegable proxy will work best when
the direct proxy assignment scale is quite small. The exact number would
vary with the nature of the organization, but in an active organization,
with broad interest among its members, I'd think that twenty direct proxies
might be about right. Then delegability allows proxies to be further
concentrated without creating a big step, without breaking the personal
links of trust that would make delegable proxy work.
Once again, this failure mode for Delegable Proxy is why I think it crucial
to introduce it into Free Associations -- which can't, by design, be
hijacked -- rather than into necessarily more stable institutions. If those
FAs don't work, little will be lost, and the networking created will still
be valuable.
(Free Association is a term which formalizes certain characteristics of
ad-hoc peer organizations, common when they start, much less common, indeed
rare, when they grow. Delegable Proxy theoretically makes it possible for
Free Associations and Direct Democracy to scale, to become quite large
without losing the freedom and full participation of direct democracy in
young organizations.)
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