Here's one more approach to using voting methods to determine what
the government should be like. In the method that I proposed one
problem is the potentially high number of different coalition
alternatives. This method makes the number of candidates smaller.
All parties are candidates. Voters will put them in the order of
preference to include them in the government coalition. The results
could be indicative, subject to further negotiations between the
parties. The winner would maybe start the negotiations and possibly
take the prime minister seat.
There could be also a technical cutoff "candidate" that the voters
would place between those parties that they want to see in the
government and those parties that they do not want to be included.
The idea is that those parties above the cutoff would be the default
candidates to be included in the government.
It is possible that many voters would "approve" only few parties and
therefore one would get a minority government if one would follow the
results of the vote literally. For this reason one could try also two
cutoffs, "absolutely yes" and "absolutely no". Then we could try to
include all parties that beat the "absolutely yes" cutoff in the
government and leave all below "absolutely no" out. Parties between
the cutoffs could be included e.g. to create a majority government.
the two cutoffs would give the negotiators somewhat richer input with
respect to what kind of government the voters want (or would approve/
accept). (The voters could be also the members of the parliament.)
Juho
On Jul 8, 2008, at 16:13 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
Juho wrote:
Few notes.
In some cases having an opposition may be a positive thing. E.g.
having always the same government may not be a good thing in the
long run.
One approach is to use some single winner method to determine the
preferred coalition that should form the government (I'm assuming
a multi-party system here) (candidates in the single winner
election are coalitions like "Party1+Party2", "Party1+Party3
+Party4" etc.). That could lead to either a majority or a minority
government, consisting of one, few or all parties.
That could be an interesting way to solve the "indecisive
parliament" or "frequent government change" problem where these
exist. In order to recall the executive, they have to vote for a
new coalition at the same time. If the winner passes a certain
threshold, the old government/executive is removed and winning
coalition gets to decide the composition of the new government;
otherwise, nothing happens.
That would be workable for matrix voting in general, too. Use the
matrix vote to find the n best governments. In a proportional
matrix voting system, the alternatives would be chosen in a way so
that the alternatives' supporters overlap as little as possible.
Then those n options are brought to a single-winner vote, and if
the winning set passes a certain threshold, the government/
executive is replaced; otherwise, nothing happens.
The greatest problem here, I think, would be if the opposition
agreed to pick some random (or otherwise undesirable) government
and coordinate their votes, and the treshold is short of a
majority. Then the new opposition does the same, and the government
cycles back and forth.
Also, the threshold constraint makes single-winner criteria
applicable to the second round. Governments that are alike except
for one single member would "split the vote" in a bad single-winner
system, just as candidates do in general elections.
___________________________________________________________
Now you can scan emails quickly with a reading pane. Get the new Yahoo! Mail. http://uk.docs.yahoo.com/nowyoucan.html
----
Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
