On Aug 18, 2008, at 1:14 , Raph Frank wrote:
In Ireland, it is rare that parties run more than 2+ candidates in
a given
constituency and if then, only the 2 main parties.
Sounds quite limiting from the point of view of allowing the voters
to decide also which persons will be elected, not only to decide
which parties will get representatives.
The problem for parties is that the surplus doesn't remain within
the party and leads to a vote management strategy. (If none
of their candidates have a large surplus, then they get to keep
most of the personal votes for any of their candidates).
This is a very interesting real life example on how such "horizontal"
preference orders may impact the elections and strategies in them.
Do you have a list of the strategies/tricks that are used?
The main one is 'vote management'. This is where you split up
the constituency and only allow certain candidates to campaign in
those areas.
A very popular candidate mightn't be allow campaign at all. In
practice, this doesn't always work out. For example, in Limerick
one of the FF candidates takes great pride in getting lots of first
choice votes.
Also, sometimes it might backfire and the very popular candidate
might fail to get elected as they don't campaign in any specific
regions.
Failing to elect a popular candidate that gets votes also from other
parties means that this party will lose all those "other party
votes". Electing this candidate with double quota means losing only
part of those votes.
(What I was thinking was basically that if there is one quota of
voters that
have opinion X then the representative body could have one
representative
that has opinion X. This could apply to parties but also to smaller
groupings and individuals as well as other criteria like regions (=>
regional proportionality) (and even representation of other
orthogonal
groups like women, age groups, religions, races if we want to make
the
system more complex).)
This is the party centric viewpoint. PR-STV is more based on the
candidate-centric viewpoint. You vote for someone because you think
they would make a good representative.
Even if there were no parties proportionality between different
segments may still be a good thing. (Party like structures are btw
likely to appear even if the election method wouldn't formally
recognize them. Also the affiliation of most candidates is probably
known.)
Also, constituencies don't need to be assigned integer numbers of
seats.
Interesting. What does this mean? Maybe some constituency that has
citizens worth 10.4 quota could have 10 or 11 seats. Or maybe the
last (11th) representative would have only 0.4 votes.
Juho
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