Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
At 10:36 AM 12/28/2008, James Gilmour wrote:
Kristofer Munsterhjelm > Sent: Sunday, December 28, 2008 9:45 AM
> The UK is also parliamentary, so I suppose there would be few places
> where you could actually have a runoff.
Given that all members of the UK Parliament are elected from
single-member districts (UK "constituencies") and that all districts
were contested by at least three candidates (max 15 in 2005), it would
be theoretically possible to have run-off elections in all
645 districts. In the 2005 general election, 425 of the districts
were "won" with a plurality of the votes not a majority, so that
could have been 425 run-offs. Quite a thought!
Sure. Consider the implications. Most of those who voted, in those
districts, did not support the winner. Odd, don't you think, that you
imagine an outcry over a "weak Condorcet winner," when what is described
is, quite possibly, an ongoing outrage.
Is it actually an outrage? It's hard to tell. It's quite possible that
the majority was willing to accept the winner; that is normally the
case, in fact. Bucklin would have found some majorities there. IRV
probably -- in spite of the theories of some -- probably a bit fewer. In
nonpartisan elections, IRV almost never finds a majority when one is not
found in the first round, but those were, I presume, partisan elections,
where finding a majority is more common.)
However, consider this: the Plurality voting system (FPTP) encourages
compromise already. There would have been more sincere first preference
votes. My guess, though, is that the use of, say, Bucklin, would have
resulted in *at least* half of those pluralities becoming a majority,
possibly more. However, this is the real effect of the system described:
In maybe one election out of 10, were it top two runoff, the result
would shift, which, I contend, is clearly a more democratic result.
There might be a slightly increased improvement if the primary method
weren't top two Plurality, majority win, but a method which would find a
Condorcet winner or at least include that winner in a runoff. How much
is it worth to improve the result -- it could be a very significant
improvement -- in 10% of elections?
I'd say it's worth a lot!
I'd also say that even if you had a magic "best utility" single-winner
method, it wouldn't be the right method to use in a parliamentary
context. If a majority of the voters agree with some position (and we
discard gerrymander-type effects, intentional or not), then the
parliament will agree with that position, unanimously. Hence... PR is
needed.
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