On May 18, 2008, at 9:05 AM, Fred Gohlke wrote:
re: "Political proportionality is the one that people most often
discuss since the election methods/systems typically provide
regional proportional automatically (e.g. in the form of single seat
districts and forcing all voters to vote at their home region,
without asking about the opinion of the voter)."
Should I infer that there is a basis for opposing regional
proportionality? I ask because it never occurred to me to question
the wisdom of "forcing all voters to vote at their home region".
Indeed, even the idea of "force" never occurred to me. I am of the
opinion that voting is a right and that one's home region is the
most logical place to exercise that right.
The objection is to "spending" all of our opportunity for
proportionality on regional proportionality; we're looking at the
fundamental argument for PR.
J S Mill makes the case better than I can: http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/m/mill/john_stuart/m645r/chapter7.html
[John Stuart Mill: "Of True and False Democracy; Representation of
All, and Representation of the Majority only", Chapter 7 of
Considerations on Representative Democracy (1861)]
But of course I'll take my own shot at it, through example.
California has an 80-seat state assembly, with 80 somewhat
gerrymandered single-seat districts. Ignoring the subtleties of quotas
and the mathematics of PR, let's say for convenience that each seat
represents 1/80 of the voters of the state. As a voter, I'd like to be
able to form a voting coalition with enough like-minded voters to
elect a representative. Depending on how strongly I feel about which
issues, how likely is it that I'll find enough like-minded voters
within my district to send a representative to Sacramento? Not very
likely, unless my some stroke of luck my interests happen to be
aligned with the major party with a (probably gerrymandered) majority
in my district.
A Republican voter in San Francisco has no chance of direct
representation in Sacramento, nor does a Democrat in Redding. Nor does
a Green or Libertarian anywhere in the state, even though both parties
have in aggregate enough members to justify 1/80 seats.
A typical STV proposal for the California assembly has multimember
districts of 5-10 seats, preserving a degree of geographic locality at
the expense of raising the threshold for minority coalitions. Notice,
though, that if the state were treated as a single 80-seat district,
there'd be nothing under an STV system to prevent voters from forming
geographically (vs party or issue) based coalitions. The difference
with that these geographic coalitions become voluntary, based on
common geographically based interests; they're not imposed (forced) on
the voters by the district system.
So, "forced" in that respect.
----
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
