On Aug 28, 2008, at 13:18 , Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote:
One more approach to this would be to provide "perfect" continuous
geographical proportionality. One would guarantee political and
geographical proportionality at the same time. One would try to
minimize the distance to the closest representative from each
voter and make the number of represented voters equal to all
representatives. In short, distribution of representatives would
be close to the distribution of the voters (while still
maintaining also political proportionality).
There would, of course, be limits to the guarantee of having both
political and geographical proportionality at the same time. If
your immediate vicinity have candidates whose opinion you
completely disagree with, one of geographical proportionality and
political proportionality will have to sacrifice part of itself for
the other.
Yes, smaller political groupings would not get as "near"
representatives. That is also natural since there are so few of them.
It is also possible that close to the voter there are many party A
supporters and therefore they get a seat. In the next neighbourhood
there are lots of B part supporters, and so on. But probably we would
still get a more accurate geographical proportionality than with
large districts.
One seat districts would be geographically very proportional, but
your nearest representative of your own party could be far away. In
this new model one could try to improve also this (=> geographical
proportionality within parties too; or count weights for the
distances based on the preferences of individual voters).
As I've said before, in that case I think political proportionality
is more important.
Yes. Political decisions are more typically made based on the
political opinions (often parties) of the representatives than based
on where they live. If the idea of geographical proportionality is to
guarantee that all regions are present then approximate
proportionality may be enough. If one wants single seat districts
then maintaining exact political proportionality requires some
"tricks" (e.g. some national seats, or not electing the most popular
candidate in some districts).
In the long run, the effect might self-stabilize, if for no other
reason that if there are many Y-ists in an area, one of them is
going to notice and want to become a candidate.
I'm not quite sure how to do perfectly continuous geographical
proportionality.
I think perfect geographical proportionality would violate perfect
political proportionality, so we can only provide approximate
geographical proportionality if political proportionality is a must.
Let's take a basic closed list method. First we will count the exact
proportionality split between the parties. Then we will (in theory)
check all possible combinations of candidates that respect the agreed
political proportionality split. Out of these we could elect e.g. the
one where the average distance to the nearest representative is lowest.
Juho
My "two linked ballots" idea would probably work, but I think we
can do better by using the distance information directly. Just how,
though, I'm not sure.
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