Fred Gohlke wrote:
Good Afternoon, Kristofer
re: "This sounds a lot like what I've previously referred to as
'council democracy'."
I hadn't heard that term before or seen the proposal. I wonder if the
concepts can be merged, perhaps by an analytical critique of the processes.
I first mentioned it here:
http://listas.apesol.org/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2008-July/021966.html
to which Abd replied here:
http://listas.apesol.org/pipermail/election-methods-electorama.com/2008-July/021968.html
. I said that I think some unions use this process: they have local
delegates that form councils that elect regional delegates and so on.
re: "The first problem of council democracy is that it magnifies
opinion in a possibly chaotic manner."
This is, I suspect, a function of the size of the 'council'. The larger
it is, the less opportunity each member has to help form its view.
That is, unless we use proportional representation. If the council is of
size 7, no opinion that holds less than 1/7 of the voters can be
represented, so if the opinion is spread too thin, it'll be removed from
the system; but if you have an extreme of a single layer with PR,
elected nationally, then the number is much lower.
An aspect of this question that troubles me is the backward-looking
nature of opinion. Government is (or, at least, ought to be) concerned
with the present and the future. We should prize our representatives'
ability to address contemporary concerns with all the resources at our
command rather than apply pre-conceived solutions to new, and possibly
unknown, circumstances. In other words, opinion must be subject to
intellect.
Yes, that's true. I'm using opinion mainly as a way to show that
minority properties can be either attenuated or magnified, based simply
on how the voters are distributed among the councils. This could apply
to any preference that may be held by only a minority (or even by a
majority, as the worst case scenario shows): it could be a preference
for deliberative or intelligent representatives for that matter.
re: "In the very worst case, an opinion held by (2/3)8 = 4% can
be held by a majority of the last triad."
I lack the expertise to evaluate the math, but I don't understand the
point for a different reason: Is 'an opinion ... held by a majority of
the last triad' not but one of a multitude of such opinions? Does a
person's value rest on a single opinion or on the mix of opinions that
define the person? Indeed, is their value not better determined by
their ability to implement whatever mix of opinions we perceive them to
have?
Again, I use opinions to make the argument simple. Consider it another
way: each reduction of many triads to one triad has to, by some measure,
aggregate minority opinion. In the worst case, only the majority counts
(as this is majority-based and not a consensus mechanism), and the
minority preference (opinion, share, whatever) gets shaved off. Since
the reduction is exponential, even more gets shaved off at each
instance, and these slices may in the end constitute a majority.
re: "... but the point holds: because the comparisons are local,
disproportionality can accumulate."
I'm not clear on this point. By 'local', do you mean that the
participants are from a distinct locality? That is certainly true at
the very lowest levels, but the distinction blurs as the levels advance.
I'm not sure what will be disproportionate.
Here's an example of size 3 of the effect I'm talking about. I hope my
(and your) mail software won't mangle this too badly.
For the sake of simplicity, again, we'll consider binary opinion.
There's a question that has a yes or no answer. The concils are set up
like this:
L1 YYN YYN NNN
| | |
Y Y N
| | |
+---+---+
L2 YYN
Here there are four ayes that overrule the five nays, simply because
they're better positioned. If you look at the second level, it even
seems like the ayes have 2/3 of the public support, when that is clearly
not the case.
In an ordinary council democracy, a conspiracy could stack the councils
in this manner, but in your proposal, because of random selection, that
would not be possible. Still, it shows a problem of the process by
showing a true majority getting assigned a minority of the
representatives and vice versa.
Weighted votes could ameliorate the case, but it wouldn't fix it
completely, and it may be unwieldy. In the case above: the unanimous N
would have strength 3 while the Y members have strength 2 each, thus
giving 58% for the ayes. That's lower than the raw 2/3 ~= 67%, but still
too high.
re: "One could reduce the first problem by having a larger group
that elects more than one member."
The question of group size is worthy of considerable thought. Rather
than extend this message, I will post a message titled 'DELIBERATIVE
GROUP SIZE and PERSUASION' so we can focus on the issues separately.
Alright, I'll await that message. I'll just say that as far as
representation goes, it might be possible to quantify it mathematically.
Using larger councils with PR slows down the exponential reduction (so
there are more layers), but increases the fraction represented at each
layer. To what degree these even out, I don't know, but those who know
mathematics better than I do could perhaps find out.
Also, if the councils are intended to be act directly, one should take
into consideration Parkinson's observation about committees of varying
size: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_Inefficiency . If
that's taken at face value, it would give an upper bound of 20.
re: "The minimum possible opinion that can attain a majority here
has (4/5)9 = 13.4% support among the people."
Is that a valid assertion? I fear I'm missing some part of the point.
If a candidate feels murder is a felony, if there any reason the
candidate could not have 100% support on that opinion among the
electorate? Perhaps more important (to me) is the belief that we should
want our candidates to represent the best interest of all the people
rather than a subset of them that happen to hold some opinion.
I may have phrased that diffusely. What I meant is that the least
minority that can end up with a majority of the final triad
"representatives" is one that holds an opinion shared by 13.4% of the
people. That's a worst case binary opinion (ayes or nays) scenario.
That's not to say that the reduction can't cope with true majority
opinions. If a candidate feels murder is a felony, he could have 100%
support on that opinion, and most of the time, if there's a minority
that becomes a majority simply by fortuitious placement within the
councils, it'll have an opinion that's shared by more than 13.4%. The
worst case scenario only shows how bad it *can* get.
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