On Aug 24, 2008, at 1:34 , James Gilmour wrote:
Juho > Sent: Saturday, August 23, 2008 9:56 PM
Trying to guarantee proportionality for women at national level may
be tricky if there is no "woman party" that the candidates and voters
could name (well, the sex of a candidate is typically known, but that
is a special case).
I think you need to define what you mean by "proportionality for
women at national level". Do you mean numbers of representatives
proportional to the numbers of women among the registered electors
(typically 52%), or among the voters (women frequently
predominate), or do you mean proportional to the extent that the
voters wish to be represented by women? These criteria are all
quite different, and none of them is the usual 50:50 that is
commonly called for.
I treated women just as a random example of voter indicated
preference to favour some set of candidates.
(This was Kristofer Munsterhjelm's example. I hope he thought the
same way. This example group has also the other problem that we know
which of the candidates are women, but I think this is not intended
to limit the example either. => Just random sets of candidates.)
And why should there be guaranteed proportionality for women?
In this example, just because that can be derived from the ballots
cast, no other reasons (although of course there could be in some
other elections).
The logical corollary is guaranteed proportionality for men.
This was not intentional. Since I assumed this to be a random group
this just indicated a requirement to guarantee that at least
indicated number of women should be elected (and said nothing about
the "non-women"). In practice this may lead to proportional
representation of non-women too but I didn't consider that to be that
to be a requirement.
Depending on some method treats this kind of freely defined sets, it
is also possible that only 10% of the voters would indicate support
to women. This should not be taken to mean that the proportion of
women should be limited to 10% since many voters may be neutral with
respect to this particular opinion.
Just
for the record, I am opposed to both and would be very happy if 60%
or more of the MSPs in the Scottish Parliament were women
PROVIDED we had voted them into office by our free choice with a
suitably sensitive voting system. If we are going to guarantee
proportionality to eliminate sex discrimination, we must logically
follow with proportionality to eliminate other discriminations
that have been officially recognised, starting most obviously with
those that have already been enshrined in law: race, religion,
disability, age. Once you start down that anti-discrimination road
there is no logical end point. Better by far to change to a
sensitive voting system that gives the voters free choice among all
the candidates and encourages the political parties and other
nominating groups to offer the widest choice of candidates to the
voters, representative of the local community.
This could be purely individual candidate based as in basic STV. Or
it is possible that there would be a specific women's party or
women's subgroups for voters who feel strongly about this particular
question (not excluding also other parties to have many female
candidates and voters to vote for them).
If some voter ranks all women in his/her vote in
his/her own district first we can not tell if his/her intention was
to vote for these candidates because they are women or for
some other reason.
That is true, but such ranking is currently so unusual that I think
it would be a fair assumption.
Yes, a good guess, but there could be also situations where e.g. some
district has high concentration of members of some racial group and
most candidates are from that group. Ranking only members of that
group should in this case not be taken as an indication to support
all the members of this group at national level and in all
ideological opinion groups.
At public meetings explaining
preferential voting in preparation for the STV-PR local government
elections last year, I always made a point of telling the
audience that they could vote for ALL the women before they voted
for ANY of the men, if that was what they wanted.
Yes, the case is quite clear if ALL such candidates are listed first.
In the example there was also the additional problem of deriving
national level conclusions from the regional votes (limited to
candidates of that district).
The key determinant of women's representation in most countries is
candidate selection by the political parties, in relation to the
voting system.
Some methods like open list leave the decision to the voters. Since
open lists do not guarantee party internal proportionality women
might in some cases even benefit if the party nominates less female
candidates than male candidates (since average number of votes per
female candidate may rise).
Juho
A party may select 50% women candidates, but if the male
candidates are selected disproportionately for the winnable
seats in FPTP single-member district elections, the women will
still be unrepresented. And the voters will have had no say in the
matter. The main reason that the representation of women was so
high after the first MMP elections to the Scottish Parliament
(1999) was that the Labour Party (the largest party) had a policy
of compulsory "twinning" of adjacent single-member districts (one
man, one women) and compulsory "zipping" (man, woman, man, woman,
etc) of the closed party lists for the eight electoral regions.
Again, the voters had no say in the matter.
James
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