There could also be systems where the number of seats per district is
rather small but PR is counted at the top level. This means that you
can tweak the system to get a bit more locality and a bit more
political proportionality at the same time. (This of course has a
cost, e.g. making the set of elected candidates at each district a
bit more random (since also the election wide level will influence
the local selection of representatives).)
Juho
On Aug 17, 2008, at 22:02 , Jonathan Lundell wrote:
On Aug 17, 2008, at 11:34 AM, James Gilmour wrote:
The evidence from countries which presently have single-member
districts but are considering reform of the voting system, is that
electors want a balance between proportional representation of the
main political groups AND guaranteed local representation. It is
difficult enough to convince them that with STV-PR they really can
get both with modestly sized multi-member districts. It would be
impossible to persuade them of the benefits of PR reform if all
the members were to be elected at large (UK House of Commons = 646
MPs, Scottish Parliament = 129 MSPs). STV-PR was once viewed in
this utopian way in the UK (in the 1880s), but now it is promoted
by practical reformers who are more attuned to the concerns of
real electors.
A related problem here in California is the small size of our state
legislature, relative to the state's population. The California
state assembly (our lower house) has only 80 seats. Compare that to
the UK's 646; California has a population 60% of the UK's.
California has 5-6X the population of Scotland, but less than 2/3
the seats.
As a consequence, California's single-member Assembly districts are
already quite large, so that it's prohibitively expensive for most
candidates to mount a viable campaign. Five-member districts would
be to my way of thinking an absolute minimum (more would be
better), but without increasing the assembly size, such a scheme
would lead to enormous districts.
(For non-US readers, state-house district sizes vary widely
(wildly) from state to state. California has nearly 500K residents
per seat; Maine has ~8500.)
Some PR reforms have proposed a modest increase in the size of the
Assembly (eg from 80 to 120), but, while desirable in itself, this
would to the difficulty of implementing PR at all, given that any
change gets resisted.
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