These majorities, as described, seem close to identical twins, with little,
if any, ability for individual thinking.
Plurality promotes closeness for two major factions.
Voters have painful decisions which can result in real, if painful,
party strength - they cannot both back party choices and back other candidates.
Condorcet is an example of providing flexibility.
Voters can back whatever combination of home party/faction and other
candidates they choose.
Backing home party helps it continue its power.
Backing others helps change, and how this is or is not progressing is
partly reported in the N*N arrays from Condorcet elections.
With Condorcet there is more opportunity for controlled change and
parties/factions can see from the N*N reports what the voting suggests they
had better change for continued success.
What follows inspired my thoughts.
DWK
On Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:58:10 +0200 Jobst Heitzig wrote:
Dear Raph,
you wrote:
The thing is that in such a case, it isn't really a single 'demos'. It
is two groups voting as one.
Do you mean to say democracy is only for societies which are
sufficiently homogeneous?
That doesn't help because then the majority on issue A will still
overrule the rest in every single decision on that issue. So a
compromise option for that issue will have no chance.
You can still have compromises.
Only if the majority for some reason prefers to elect the compromise
than their favourite. But in that it seems the "favourite" was just not
the true favourite of the majority but the compromise was. So, still the
minority has no influence on the decision but can only hope that the
majority is nice enough to decide for the compromise.
In fact, it can be helpful if multiple issues are voted as a single
unit. This allows negotiation between factions in order to make up
the majority.
This common behavious is a pretty artificial construct to overcome the
discussed drawbacks of majoritarian rules.
A faction can make compromises on issues that it doesn't care about
in order to get things that it does. This requires there is no solid
bloc though.
And when both factions care about both issues?
A split society will only function poorly when a majoritarian
method is used. When they use a method like FAWRB instead, they
will function well because then they will care what the other
faction wants, will try to devise good compromise options, and will
vote in a way which makes sure the good compromises are elected
instead of the random ballot result. This is possible *precisely*
because with a non-majoritarian method the majority cannot simply
ignore the minority but has to figure out how to get them to
approve a compromise that is sufficiently near to their favourite.
Non-majoritarian methods encourage discourse and cooperation.
Sounds reasonable, the problem is that a) people don't like random
methods b) it will result in certain outlier elements in society
getting some power.
a) FAWRB is not a random but a very specific and quite sophisticated
method. It only uses a certain amount of chance, just as many things in
our life do. Chance should not be mixed up with arbitrariness. Used in a
rational way, FAWRB will usually elect good compromise options with near
certainty, not leading to significant amounts of randomness.
Perhaps a threshold could be set before a candidate can participate.
Yes, I agree. The version I just proposed to Terry incorporates such a
threshold.
Also, the citizens of the US didn't get to vote on the restrictions
of civil rights directly. It was handled by Congress.
Using majority rule?
That someone was me.
Sorry, Greg didn't include your name in his post (or I couldn't find
it).
No need to be sorry.
Yours, Jobst
--
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Dave Ketchum 108 Halstead Ave, Owego, NY 13827-1708 607-687-5026
Do to no one what you would not want done to you.
If you want peace, work for justice.
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