On Nov 2, 2009, at 1:53 PM, Raph Frank wrote:
On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 6:51 AM, Juho <[email protected]> wrote:
If the votes (and proportionality) are counted at national level
that fixes
the (district fragmentation related) problem. STV is at its best in
small
districts with small number of candidates and seats, so it
typically leaves
some space to distortion in proportionality as caused by the district
structure.
While I would agree there is a compromise between distict size and
complexity for the voter, I don't agree that PR-STV is at its best
with a small districts.
Districts with 7+ seats seem reasonable, and give reasonable
proportionality.
I guess there is some practical limit to how may candidates the voters
are willing to evaluate and rank. Districts of 7+ already offer
reasonable proportionality (approximate quite well the x% of votes => x
% of seats principle). Also the number of candidates should be small
enough in this case so that the voters need not rank too many
candidates (e.g. 10 candidates from each party).
The targets may be different in different places though. Finland has
found its smallest districts of size 6 to be unacceptable (people have
moved away from those regions and therefore the sizes have gone down)
and plans a reform (largest district = 34 seats). Small parties can
not currently get any seats in those small districts (they may however
try by joining in larger alliances). The new proposal aims at (close
to) full proportionality counted at country level.
Also the number of districts has an impact here. If there are e.g. 10
districts of size 7 there could be a party with 10% support and no
seats although from a nation wide perspective 10% of the votes would
justify 7 seats.
List based methods have also similar problems but in them it is
easier to have the whole country as one district (=> better
proportionality
but weaker local representation (and as a result weaker "regional
proportionality"))
I think they also suffer from the same trade-off, between giving
voters max choice and preventing them being overloaded with options.
Under a tree system, you still need to list all the candidates in the
country. However, granted the voter just needs to pick one candidate
to vote for.
Yes, districts with independent elections set similar limitations in
all systems. In list based systems it is just somewhat easier to
extend them e.g. so that proportionality will be counted at country
level. Candidate lists could still be regional if one so wants (the
summed up votes would determine proportions at the country level, and
seats could then be propagated back down (as in the Finnish proposal)).
or they can be easily extended to count the "political
proportionality" at national level but still allocate the seats in
the
districts (and thereby maintain also "regional proportionality" and
more
local representation).
I think this is reasonable. I made a suggestion about how to allow
that while retaining the spirit of PR-STV locally.
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg04272.html
This gives allows candidate level elections locally while allowing any
wasted votes to be distributed to parties nationally.
Yes, this is one way to extend STV to offer better proportionality at
the country level. This method seems to combine some list type
features with STV voting.
(Btw, did you consider the possibility of parties running their most
popular candidates (that will be elected in any case) outside the
party list. Is that a valid strategy in this method?)
Juho
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