On Aug 16, 2008, at 0:48 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Jobst Heitzig said:
> It is of no help for a minority to be represented
proportionally when > still a mere 51% majority can make all
decisions!
I disagree. The advantage is that it allows 'on the fly'
coalition re-organisation.
If all the legislators are elected via a single seat system, then
in effect, the 2 coalitions must be decided prior to the
election. In
fact, in the US, the Republican and Democrat 'coalitions' last on a
> multi-decade scale.
A block of 15% of the legislature would be a minority. However,
if something oppressive was attempted against them, they could switch
sides. However, if all the legislators were elected via a single
seat method, then
the supporters of those 15% would have to wait until the
subsequent election
and it might be to late by then.
This appears to be, more generally, an issue of feedback. Democracy
itself does better than dictatorship (even from a purely technical
point of view, as opposed to a moral one) because the people can
steer the representatives in the right direction. If the rulers get
too detached from this correction, they get corrupted by the power
and bad things happen.
If that's correct, then we should try to find ways of connecting
the system even more tightly. Proportional representation would fit
within this idea set for the reasons you point out, or broadly,
that as minorities change, the representative-voter links update
more quickly than they do within a majoritarian system.
Predictions based on that idea would consider the ideal to be
direct democracy. Next to that would be continuous update of
representative power ("continuous elections"). While both of these
might work if we were machines, the former scales badly and the
latter would put an undue load on the voters unless they could
decide whether to be part of any given readjustment.
I don't see the burden to voters as a big problem since the system
allows some voters to follow and influence politics daily and some to
react only on a yearly basis.
(Continuous elections could also increase the level of participation
in decision making in the sense that old votes could be valid for a
long time even if the voter wouldn't bother to change the vote often.
Well, on the other hand the votes must have some time/event limits
after which they become invalid. Otherwise the system would e.g. make
any changes in the party structure very "unprofitable".)
If we consider the case where decisions have effects that don't
appear instantly, it gets more complex. For instance, democratic
opinion could shift more quickly than the decisions made by one
side has time to settle or actually do any difference. But even
there, if we consider it an issue of feedback, we have parallels;
in this case to oscillations or hunting, and to control theory
regarding how to keep such oscillations from happening.
When thinking about the problems of continuous elections and direct
democracy maybe the first problem in my mind is the possibility of
too fast reactions. Populism might be a problem here. Let's say that
the economy of a country is in bad shape and some party proposes to
raise taxes to fix the problem. That could cause this party to
quickly lose lots of support. These rather direct forms of democracy
could be said to require the voters to be more "mature" than in some
more indirect methods in the sense that the voters should understand
the full picture and not only individual decisions that may sometimes
even hurt them. In an indirect democracy painful decisions are
typically not made just before the elections. This is not an ideal
situation either. But all in all, the more direct forms of democracy
seem attractive if the voters are mature enough.
Juho
The feedback point of view is not an end-all-be-all. If there's a
static or consistent majority that decide to, as an example,
exclude minorities, that is "democratic", but still not a good
state of things, and no amount of making the democracy more
accurately translate the wishes of the majority into action can fix
that, since the majority wants to keep on excluding the minority.
PS
Anyone know a better free mail system that doesn't cause lots
of ??? when
I post to this group?
The usual suspects should work: Gmail, hotmail, Yahoo; or see the
Wikipedia comparison page at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Comparison_of_webmail_providers . Most ISPs also provide mail
accounts of their own for their subscribers, and (without knowing
more) I'd assume yours do as well; if that is so, you could use
that account and a dedicated mail reader like Thunderbird.
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