Re: [Election-Methods] Partisan Politics

[Juho]

On May 19, 2008, at 1:46 , James Gilmour wrote:

Juho > Sent: Sunday, May 18, 2008 10:31 PM
Single-seat districts (the usual ones) provide very tight regional
representation / proportionality.

True, if you are prepared to accept that you have "regional  
representation"
when a majority of those elected are elected on minority votes.

 Political proportionality on the
other hand is very poor.

Multi-member districts provide less strict regional proportionality
but better political proportionality.

If the numbers of electors per member are similar, I don't see why the
regional proportionality should be any less.

I was thinking about the fact that in single-seat districts the  
geographical area that one representative represents is as small as  
it can be. Multi-member districts tend to be larger. I don't mean  
that single-seat districts would be any better. Bigger districts may  
well be sufficient to satisfy the need of regional proportionality.  
This depends of how people feel about the regions. (If there are e.g.  
10 parties there could be also 10 regions and people could be happy  
with that.)

  (With STV-PR, strictly you
have adjust on the assumed quota because the absolute value of the  
Droop
quota increases with district magnitude.  But that's all  
unnecessary anyway
because the differences in turnout will make a complete nonsense of  
all the
efforts to obtain perfect equality of numbers!)


The number of seats per district is important. If one district has 5
seats and another has 10 seats the chances of small groups to get
their candidates elected is different. The number of seats sets a
limit on the size of the parties that they must reach to get their
first seat (the case with one seat only is an extreme case that
typically favours two large parties with about 50% support each).

You must be careful to distinguish here between the proportion of  
votes to
win one seat and the actual number of votes to win one seat.  In a  
smaller
district (fewer seats), the proportion is higher but the number of  
votes is
smaller, and vice versa for a larger district.

I think the key aspect of district magnitude that matters to  
electors is the
number of different groups of voters who can obtain direct  
representation.
So in a 5-member district only five different groups could be  
represented
directly, but in a 10-member district, ten different groups could be
represented directly.  Of course, in both districts, the voters  
could choose
direct representation of only two or three groups, but that would  
be the
voters' choice.

In Finland one of the experienced problems that led to the new  
proposal was that a vote to the Greens in some of the smallest  
districts was a "lost vote".

In Finland there is currently one electoral reform proposal (with
support of majority of the parties) under discussion. The current
proposal gets rid of the current calculation rules that threat
different size districts differently. The basic idea is that the
number of representatives that each party will get will be counted
first at national level, and then the seats will be distributed to
the districts so that both political and regional proportionality
requirements will be met.

In the proposed system votes of a small group will thus be summed up
at national level. Even if the votes at some district would not be
enough to get even one seat the sum of votes in several districts may
be enough to guarantee one seat (that will be allocated to
that group  in one of the districts).

(The proposed system contains currently also a general threshold
level that parties need to reach to get any seats, but that's
another  story.)

Why go to the bother of summing the votes at national level to get  
better
proportionality if you are then going to impose an arbitrary  
threshold?   It
is a very common feature of party list PR systems, but it seems  
crazy to me,
especially as the threshold is completely arbitrary.

One reason is the "lost votes". If one counts the votes at national  
level then minor party voters at regions where they have no chance of  
getting their candidate elected can still sincerely vote for their  
favourite party.

I agree that the threshold is a bit weird, especially since earlier  
Finland has not had any such arbitrary thresholds. Earlier the number  
of seats per district did cut some of the smallest parties away. If  
votes are counted at national level that makes it possible to get  
seats with less votes. The threshold was invented by the current  
parties. It would roughly cut out parties that do not have any seats  
at the moment. This need has been called "avoiding the fragmentation  
of the political field" or something similar. I think there is no  
such major problem at the moment in Finland, so this should probably  
be classified more as "we don't want to donate all our sets to  
newcomers".

The level of the threshold is not "completely arbitrary" in the sense  
that it tries to put the threshold in a place where the current  
parties would stay in and newcomers would stay out. There has been  
quite lot of criticism against these thresholds (from non- 
politicians). (I addition to a national 3.5% threshold there is also  
another district specific 12% threshold and yet in addition one 2%  
threshold for getting financial support. I'd kill the latter two and  
eliminate or lower the first one.)

The system is not STV based but open party list based, so it is quite
straight forward to sum up the votes of candidates of each opinion
group although the candidates are different at different districts.

It is thus possible to implement both regional and political
proportionality at the same time. And that is possible even if the
voters (of small parties/groupings) would be "forced" to vote
candidates of their own district.

Of course, STV-PR is about proportionality of a different kind,  
that cannot
be measured by summing votes regionally or nationally according to  
some
party label.  But THAT is, indeed, another story.

Yes, maybe a nice challenge to develop a corresponding method based  
on STV.

Juho


James
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