On Aug 17, 2008, at 21:25 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
(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".)
Another option that presents itself is that of candidates handing
over their power to their "successors", but one should be very wary
of unintended consequences if one makes power transferrable in non-
transparent ways.
Yes. Candidate X has probably received votes from both voters whose
opinion is ...X>Y>... and from voters whose opinion is ...X>Z>... .
Donating all the power to Y is not fair.
Party list elections could just have the party instead of the
candidates gain the power, but I think that would defeat some of
the dynamic purpose of continuous elections, and possibly lead to
pseudoparties whose only purpose is to shield the candidates from
changes of opinion.
Yes. Donating the power to the party (or whatever surrounding next
level group) makes more sense. Voters may have the interest to cast a
new more focused vote, but at least this approach is quite balanced
and doesn't lose any votes (from the "host group"). (In STV one might
need to recount the votes to cover also inheritance towards other
parties/groupings/candidates.)
From the feedback point of view, populism would be another form of
overreaction or opinion shifting too quickly. Consider the tax
case. For the sake of the argument, let's say that the tax raise is
going to make things better in the long run. Then the problem is
that the adjustment mechanism (the people using the election
system) react too quickly. A common way of fixing this for ordinary
feedback systems is to introduce smoothing. In a continuous
election, this may take the shape of that, if you change your vote,
the power given to the previous candidate slowly decreases while
the power given to the new candidate slowly increases instead of
happening immediately. This would "take the edge off" populism and
other overreaction-related problems while avoiding the
representative problem of "don't do anything before the elections",
since "the elections" can still be any day of the year, and a
different day for different supporters of any given candidate.
Yes, smoothing in time is one possible approach to making the changes
less radical. Politicians may however also in this version be afraid
of the changes. Knowing that one's support is down at 10% even though
one still has 15% of the power may be a frightening situation to be
in. The credibility of the party would suffer although it would still
have almost all of its original power.
Juho
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