Juho wrote:
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.)
It can be treated as either. Some properties, like whether a candidate
is a woman, can be objectively ascertained. Others, like opinion, can't
be determined as readily - all we have for opinion is what the
candidates actually say, as well as their past history, and there's no
mechanism that can say "yes, he truly believes this" in contrast to "no,
he's only saying it because that's what the voters want to hear".
Reading my past posts, I intended "woman" to be just another binary
property, but in some other branches of this thread, I've also
considered methods that use the objective verification property of
"being a woman" (to balance assemblies if that is desired).
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.
I was going to say that it'd seem, from a binary point of view, that
valuing proportionality x of those in a given set implies valuing
proportionality (1-x) of those not in the set. But the binary point of
view is wrong. As you say, many people would have no particular interest
in which way the distribution goes. A variant of the argument may still
apply, though. If 10% really want women candidates and 90% don't care,
then having 11% or 9% would be equally bad (presumably) from the point
of view of the 90% of the voters that don't care. Therefore, it's not
critical that there are >10% women candidates. The slack will be more
taut in the less-than direction (because the women-prefering voters
would have no problem with a superproportional allocation of women), but
it wouldn't be absolute since the other 90% don't seem to care, making
this a less important issue than if, say, 20% preferred women, 10% men,
and the other 80% had no opinion.
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.
A better estimate would be whether more candidates of a certain group
are elected than one would expect from a random sample of the community
or district in question. Even that isn't foolproof, because there may be
some properties that people who desire to be a part of the political
process (i.e. candidates) tend to have with greater frequency than those
who don't.
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