On Mar 4, 2008, at 23:56 , Fred Gohlke wrote:
Good Afternoon, Dave
If I gave you the impression I was "... demanding that it (the party
system) release control", I erred. I make no such demand, nor do I
believe one to be practical.
Strong party structure has its problems. Having no parties may be
impossible. And not having parties or other groupings may also cause
problems to the voters since they have hard time finding out what
each individual candidate stands for.
I note these problems of the two extremes since I want to present one
intermediate approach. That approach is to allow and encourage having
a more detailed group structure than just few monolithic parties. It
could be possible e.g. to name different fractions within one major
party. Some small parties could get together under a common umbrella
organization. And all the groups could in principle be split into
smaller groups until they have only two members.
This would lead to a hierarchical structure of parties/ideologies/
groupings. It is possible to have a green wing under some right wing
party, and a right wing section within the green party. It is quite
easy to calculate proportional representation within such
hierarchical structure.
The benefits when compared to a partyless system is that now the
voters can see better who represents what and what such candidates
there are that are close to my preferences. The representatives also
show clearly "colour" before the elections and are therefore to some
extent bound to promoting the kind of policy they said they would
drive. (It would not be as easy to say different things to each
audience.)
Just an idea in case you are interested in seeking alternatives to
strong monolithic parties and total lack of parties.
Juho
___________________________________________________________
All New Yahoo! Mail Tired of [EMAIL PROTECTED]@! come-ons? Let our SpamGuard protect you. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html
----
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
