⸘Ŭalabio‽ wrote:
Note: I got swamp with work a few weeks ago, but since Kristofer
Munsterhjelm went through the trouble of writing me, I should
respond.
2011-04-18T18:46:16Z, “Kristofer Munsterhjelm”
<[email protected]>:
The ideas of districts is that the politicians are accountable to
the people in their districts. If a proposed dam would flood a
district, the Representative would try to stop it. With
proportional representation, none in the legislature may try to
save the district.
With district-based systems, groups which are not at least a
plurality somewhere receive no representation. It is good to
have an house of proportional representation and a separate house
of district-absed representation.
If politicians are only looking out for their own hides (which
seems to be a prerequisite for what you're saying), then you have
two situations:
- In a district-based system, you would have one representative
that is very concerned about the dam, and (n-1) representatives
that aren't at all (because the district's votes don't go to them).
- In a PR system, you would have n representatives that are all
somewhat concerned about the dam, because the people who would be
in the district all affect the composition of the council.
Thus, on the average, you would have the same result; only that in
one case, all the concern for the dam is concentrated on a single
candidate whereas in the other, it is spread throughout.
People are lazy. Being somewhat interested probably would not make
the politicians act. A politician whose district is about to go
underwater if a proposed dam comes to be will be very motivated.
That politician might talk the other politicians into not building
the dam.
The country I live in (Norway) has PR with multimember districts, and I
haven't heard of problems like that. Large projects usually get the
required analysis before they're built, even if they would only impact
part of a district if they went wrong. (Actually, I'd say there are too
few large projects of the kind I think is important, but that's another
matter and related to the particular nature of Norwegian politics more
than PR.)
So I don't see any advantage to single-member representation here,
and quite a lot of disadvantages: A Single-member district method
requires either an independent redistricting commission or
equivalent, a program that will draw sometimes-unusual regions, or
that the people endure gerrymandering, whereas multimember
proportionality gets rid of this problem.
We have algorithms which draw nice districts.
You have algorithms that draw contiguous equipopulous districts.
However, they're completely arbitrary as far as natural communities go.
The districts might split a city or town in two, or might pass right
through a representative's house, or any number of such effects.
Now, that's probably unavoidable if you're dealing with single-winner
districts, since we can't expect that the size of natural communities
will fit well with the size of the district, but this problem is
attenuated with multiple winners, because each district can fit more
people. For instance, here in Norway, each multiwinner district
corresponds to one of our natural "counties" (first level administrative
regions), of which there are 19.
There are of course reasons for not having too large multimember
districts, such as that it's hard to rank 10 candidates (or to know
their positions),
¿Why rank? ¿Why not use assetvoting?
I think it's better that the decisions are close to the people than far
away. The point of representative democracy is that we can't make every
single decision ourselves, so we need someone to handle the daily
maintenance - to reduce the variety, so to speak - but the
representatives have their own objectives that may differ from ours.
Usually, that's considered part of the cost of having representative
democracy in the first place, but if we don't have to pay that cost, why
pay it?
Asset is better than Plurality (and probably SNTV), but I'm not
convinced it's better than ranked multiwinner systems. The closest thing
seen to Asset itself - Fiji's voting method twist where each party
provides a prespecified "negotiating order" through the ranks provided -
often gave counterintuitive results.
(All of this might seem internally contradictory with that I prefer a
parliamentary system to a presidential one, but there, I think the
effect of the legislature continually checking the executive is of
greater benefit than what is lost by going through a "middle-man" - the
legislature - to determine the composition of the executive. The people
can only directly affect the executive once every n years, but the
parliament can do so every single day, and if elected by PR, it should
at least be somewhat representative of the people at large.)
and that feedback becomes too weak, but the good news is that
gerrymandering runs into diminishing returns pretty quickly, so
small multimember constituencies would be good enough. AFAIK,
gerrymandering an n-member district using a Droop proportional
method would only let you swing 1/(n+1) of the vote in the very
worst case. Even that disproportionality can be handled - at least
on a party level - by something like Schulze's STV-MMP suggestion,
if exact proportionality is very important.
Assetvoting does not require ranking and is proportional.
I would prefer an house for the states (each state would get get a
score (20) senators chosen proportionally via assetvoting), an house
for the districts (chosen via scorevoting), and an house of
proportional representation (chosen via assetvoting). I would prefer
the districts to be drawn without regard to stateboundaries (the
senate represents the states), but if you are married to districts
fitting in states, we can split the states into districts totally 548
(Wyoming has 1 548th the population of the country) for the nation.
The president would be elected via scorevoting.
It could *work*, but I still think it's too heavily engineered. The
states also aren't just a bunch of interesting boundaries on a map,
they're administrative units, and I think it makes sense to elect within
the administrative units, so I wouldn't reshape the states or have the
national districts cross their borders.
My own heavily engineered solution would probably involve Condorcet for
the president (hey, I like Condorcet :) ), STV or some ideal monotone
multiwinner method for the House, and then if I'm to have three houses,
the third would consist of people picked randomly (because they're very
hard to corrupt), refreshed say, a tenth every 1/10 of the cycle decided
for that house, and that period could be coprime to the others (i.e. odd
number of years). Perhaps I'd use Condorcet (or a cardinal method) for
the Senate, though Gohlke's triad system would be even more interesting
to use; but at that point it's getting really overengineered.
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