On Aug 16, 2008, at 0:51 , James Gilmour wrote:
Juho > Sent: Friday, August 15, 2008 8:27 PM
I understood that in this case the parties were irrelevant and
therefore basic lists may be sufficient to put in place a structure
that covers all the relevant questions.
If by "party" we mean a formal (or registered) group with internal
disciplinary procedures, then "parties" are irrelevant.
I was thinking of the regular political parties that otherwise exist
in the country but that are not relevant in these school elections.
But you
cannot have "lists" without some comparable formal procedures. And
in any event, "basic lists" are never sufficient, if you believe
that the essence of representative democracy is allowing the voters
to select their representatives as freely as possible.
It is a positive target to allow voters to select their
representatives as freely as possible. There are however also other
criteria (e.g. simplicity, clarity), and in these school elections
also simple lists might well be sufficient. (I don't see lists as a
necessity in these school elections but as an option that would
probably work well enough.)
Lists of
any kind will always be constraining. And they are unnecessary (as
well as, in my view, undesirable).
Constraining in the sense of not being most flexible, yes. Why do you
see lists as undesirable?
So why bother with them when
there is a "free-choice" alternative already available? If the
voters want to vote by party, or by declared policy, or by sex (vote
for all the women before any of the men!) or by race or by religion
or by disability, or by policies X, Y or Z, or by whatever, that
is the voters' choice and in a properly representative democracy we
should go as far as we can to accommodate such wishes
(consistent with any other constraints the electors may wish, like
localism).
In theory, if there are more than one issue, e.g. X and Y, then there
could be more lists, e.g. for "X and Y", "X and not Y", "not X and Y"
and "not X and not Y".
But this is all so constricting and constraining and so unnecessary.
In the case of the school elections the issues may be rather simple.
There can be two different viewpoints to political elections. One
where the voters are seen to express their personal views as well as
they can, and another one where the typical opinion patterns are
first collected into umbrella concepts (that are called ideologies or
parties) (and then people may gather under and influence the
evolution of those ideologies that they associate themselves with).
I mentioned also the tree option to cover more complex structures.
(And it is possible to extend from that, but that will get more
complex then, maybe deleting the basic simplicity of voting in list
and tree based methods.)
Again, unnecessary.
I thought you were promoting the idea of allowing the voters to
express themselves in richer ways. Why not go in that direction?
(maybe you think STV-PR is already a good enough solution for all
needs and therefore intermediate solutions are not needed??)
One thing worth noting when comparing list based and STV style
methods is that although the voters have all kind of opinions the
candidates represent a more limited set of opinions. One candidate
could be said to have opinions X and Y in that order of importance.
As a result that candidate could represent "section Y of party X".
Probably also the voter has some order of importance in her opinions,
and could therefore vote either "section Y of party X" or "section X
of party Y". Very complex preferences will be lost in the rounding
errors in any method.
This is very true. Each voter must decide for himself or herself
which is the best fit of their own views in n-dimensional issue
space to the one dimensional array of preferences for the
candidates who have offered themselves for election. All sorts of
compromises will be involved in that condensation for each and
every voter, whether or not those voters are aware of that.
Lists and trees are not quite as flexible as STV but on the other
hand in them voting is much simpler.
Yes, it is much simpler just to put one "X" against one list of 12
party-ordered candidates as we do in each of the eight electoral
regions for the Scottish Parliament. Then by the magic of d'Hondt,
seven candidates from the competing lists are elected to the
seven top-up seats in each region. But I don't think
representative democracy is best served by such simplification. It
would be
more of a challenge to mark in order of preference four or five
candidates from each of the larger parties and one or two from
several smaller parties, plus a few independents. (We had 23
"lists" in two of our electoral regions in the 2007 elections and 15
or 16 in the other six regions.) But I had no trouble at all in
marking preferences that made sense to me for all 10 of the
candidates who stood in my local 4-member ward to be elected to
Edinburgh City Council by STV-PR on the same day.
I see two evolution paths here. One from closed lists to open lists
and trees, and one that uses candidate level granularity and voter
specific ordering. (maybe something like simplicity and structure vs.
freedom of expression)
There can be also some benefits in forcing the candidates to declare
their association and priorities. If they are not declared that opens
some doors to more vague marketing, promises in all directions and
possibility that the candidate will promote different things after
being elected than what the voter expected.
But without the sanction of party discipline such "forcing" is
either impossible or meaningless.
Party discipline with sanctions is one level of forcing
representatives to follow the party opinions (quite restricting, may
make some of the representatives just "voting machines", increases
the negotiation and voting power of the party somewhat). Pure
declarations without discipline and sanctions is another level that
serves the voters and media simply by making it clear what each
candidate stands for.
STV-PR gives the voters some flexibility
that the list (or tree) based methods do not give but here I didn't
see anything special that would speak against the use of lists.
STV-PR does not provide "some" flexibility - STV-PR provides
complete flexibility for each voter to express her or his personal
preferences among all the candidates on whatever basis that
individual voter chooses. Your preferences and mine may be
identical,
but it is probably that we have placed the candidates in that
common order for quite different reasons.
STV-PR is more flexible than list based methods ("some" or more than
"some"). Sometimes that flexibility may also bring problems like long
votes and need to analyze all the candidates. If there are very many
candidates it could be useful to allow also inheritance by default
(for short votes) (to parties or to candidate's own favourites
(includes also risks like in Fiji)) or group names in votes, e.g.
MyCandidate>MyParty. (Hybrid methods between lists and STV are thus
also possible.)
That would certainly be possible, but it would be an unnecessary
complication.
Simplifications as well.
(Lists may also be more practical in some cases, e.g. if the
number
of candidates is high.)
The largest STV-PR election I know of had 450 candidates for 120
places, but I would not recommend such a high district magnitude!
What was the number of districts here? Was this a single district
with 120 seats or are the 120 places a sum of smaller districts?
Sorry, I should perhaps have said explicitly "within one electoral
district", hence my reference to a district magnitude I would not
recommend. This was the first STV-PR election for a medical
professional council that covered the whole UK and had many medical
disciplines within it. After one or perhaps two such elections,
they split the UK proportionately into four territorial electoral
districts (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland).
To allow for diversity in representation you also need a reasonable
minimum, so that the larger parties will be "forced" to nominate
at least two candidates each, so that the voters get some choice
within parties as well as between them.
Are there problems with having too few candidates somewhere?
Yes, most definitely. In Scotland our 1,222 councillors (in 32
Councils) were all elected from wards returning either 3 or 4
councillors. In many wards even some of the larger parties put up
only one candidate, so that the supporters got no choice of
representative WITHIN the party. You'll find a lot of excellent
analysis of those 2007 Scottish Local Government elections on the
Electoral Reform Society's website. Many of us campaigned for more
flexibility in district magnitude while the legislation was
going through the Scottish Parliament, but 3s and 4s was a done
deal between the then coalition government parties. There is no
good reason why cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh should not have
wards returning 7 or 8 councillors. Then the larger parties would
have no option but to offer real teams of candidates and their
supporter would choose among them.
I just note here that it may be useful to have districts that are
about equal in size to keep the "party cutoff levels" (=
proportionality level with respect to minority opinions) roughly at
the same level everywhere (or alternatively use some additional
balancing mechanisms).
At least
in list based elections it seems that parties prefer nominating many
candidates rather than one or few.
In the UK this looks more like a political virility symbol than
anything else. Scotland elects seven MEPs for the European
Parliament by closed-list party-list PR (d'Hondt calculation). It
is considered a sign of political weakness if any of the major
parties does not nominate seven candidates even though all the
opinion polls for months before the elections show that none of the
parties will ever win all seven seats. It is much the same with
the closed-lists for the regional part of the MMP elections to the
Scottish Parliament, where each registered party is allowed to
nominate up to 12 candidates for each regional list.
I'm used to the idea of parties nominating many more candidates than
they can ever get through. Partly this is to collect votes from all
directions. Partly this may serve also as kind of early primaries
that will make some of the candidates stronger in preparation for the
next elections although they will not be elected this time yet.
In STV there might be some risk of
vote splitting when parties nominate multiple candidates (since
voters could either forget to rank their own party candidates or rank
candidates of other parties instead of them). Maybe also the single-
member tradition has some psychological influence here.
There are some very large difference in voter behaviour in STV-PR
elections. In Malta, voting the party ticket is almost universal,
to the extent that the two main parties sometimes nominate 12
candidates for the 5-member electoral districts. (The "spares" are
used to fill any casual vacancies during the life of the
Parliament.) In Ireland, typically fewer than half of the
supporters of
either of the two larger parties will vote the party ticket. In
Northern Ireland, voter behaviour lies somewhere between these two.
Don't know the details of these mechanisms but tickets seem to me
like add-ons that may have both good and bad effects. They do reduce
the problems of vote splitting due to short votes.
For public elections,
however, there is practical trade-off because electors, especially
those brought up with decades of single-member districts (UK,
USA), will want a guaranteed level of local representation. Where
you can strike the balance in that trade-off will almost
certainly vary from country to country.
Yes, there is a trade-off between locality of the representatives and
accuracy of proportional representation (it is also possible to have
both, but that means some other "rounding errors" like not electing
the most popular candidates in each district). If the number of seats
in each district is higher than one then the idea of one
representative who knows that she represents all the local voters is
already gone (there will be uncertainty on who represents whom) => it
is then easier to go for higher seat numbers per district too.
District magnitude is about more than the precision of the
proportionality obtained. It is also about the limit of the
diversity of
representation that can be obtained. If you elect only 3 members
together, only three "groups" can possibly obtain direct
representation. If you elect 7 members together, seven different
"groups" could obtain direct representation. Of course, the
voters in the larger district may not want direct representation
for seven different "groups" - they may give 3 seats to one group
and 4 seats to one other group, but at least the potential was
there and the outcome was the voters' choice. I'll leave the myths
about the wonders of representation and accountability in single-
member districts for another occasion - in any event, these myths
are propagated mainly by politicians who are opposed to reforms
that would give more representative results.
I tend to favour counting exact proportionalities at national (=whole
election) level ((if one wants PR in the first place)). I also tend
to think that most old stable democracies do not need explicit or
implicit cutoffs "to maintain the stability of the system" since most
of them seem to have more problems with having the same old boring
parties in power continuously rather than having problems with
fighting against too many diverse viewpoints. I also tend to favour
more fine-grained expression of opinions, as in STV or with trees, as
a way to allow the voters to better influence the direction the
system takes (reduces the risk of stagnation and alienation of the
voters from the "parties and politics that continue as before no
matter how we vote").
Juho
James
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