On Sep 11, 2009, at 1:03 AM, Raph Frank wrote:
On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Juho <[email protected]> wrote:
The hysteresis function may increase the strategic opportunities
since
voters could trust that old representatives will be elected in any
case and
they could try free riding. But in real life small hysteresis may
well not
be too problematic.
Maybe you could play around with the quota. For example, the Droop
quota could be used for sitting representatives and the Hare quota for
everyone else.
Yes, that sounds quite mild, and those quotas also have some rather
logical explanations (on what one wants to achieve with them and why
exactly these quota are used).
One rather strong hysteresis function that I came to think of now is
to keep all those old representatives that got enough votes to become
elected in the last election but allow elimination of those
representatives whose seat was saved in the last election because of
this rule. I.e. if they fail twice in a row they are out.
One strategy against this method would be to try to maintain two
representatives with one quota of votes and to concentrate votes to
one of them in each election (A>B>..., B>A>... etc.). Similar
strategic voting could be used also in other hysteresis cases. The
party could e.g. recommend vote Cand1>Cand2>Rep1>Rep2>... or
Cand1>Cand2>Rep2>Rep1>... if they assume that representatives Rep1 and
Rep2 will get sufficient number of transferred overflow votes also
this way. They could also fool the proportionality slightly this way
(=get 4 representatives with 3+ quota of votes if 1/2 quota is enough
to keep the seat of the old representatives).
Staggering of elections, so that there isn't a single election day,
may or may not be a good thing. Would it mean that the government is
always in campaign mode or would it never be in campaign mode.
Yes, and both approaches could be either a good thing or a bad thing.
Currently typical systems have periods of campaigning (with promises
and smiles and fights and contacts to the voters) and periods of work
(with ability to make decisions that are not very appealing to the
voters in short term but that make sense in the long run, but also
with cabinet decisions and with ability to do whatever unwanted things
(like making money oneself and for one's friends) that will be
forgotten and overridden with new propaganda before the next election).
If the elections would be held often enough people could also vote as
in the previous election. One approach to hysteresis would be to use
the ballots of the previous election for those voters that didn't
bother to vote this time. This would be quite difficult to arrange
though. One could use also proxies to achieve some similar effect, or
the personal computers of the voters could maintain the preferences of
the voters and send these preferences automatically to the officials
when needed (maybe every day in some extreme scenario).
I'd be interested in trying also frequent or continuous elections
somewhere (with or without hysteresis in the method). Maybe the voters
and representatives would learn new practices, and we would learn from
that. Different societies would certainly react in different ways.
(Also strategic voting would change a bit since in some scenarios the
strategic voters would have recent and accurate information on how
others actually voted. Of course also counter strategies would come
into play, and people could soon get bored with strategic fluctuation
and it could become just noise.)
Juho
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