> Michael Allan: http://zelea.com/project/autonomy/a/fau/fau.xht "An individual vote has no effect on the formal outcome of the election; whether the vote is cast or not, the outcome is the same regardless. This appears to open a structural fault in society between the individual person and the individual vote. The voter as such (as a decider) is thus alienated from the means and product of decision, and thereby disengaged from political power and freedom. I argue that the sum of these disengagements across the population amounts to a power vacuum, which, in mid to late Victorian times, led to the effective collapse of the electoral system and the rise of a mass party system. Today, the organized parties make the decisions and exercise the political power that was intended for the individual voters. I trace these failures back to a technical design flaw in the electoral system ..."
--REPLY: Theories need to be judged via experiment. A massive experimental refutation of this entire thesis would seem to be the fact that honeybees have been highly successfully using range-voting elections for millions of years: http://rangevoting.org/ApisMellifera.html However, despite this immensity of time and the immensity of the number of elections (hundreds of trillions !!!) they've held, honeybees still have not reached "the effective collapse of the electoral system and the rise of a mass party system." Note, honeybee experimental evidence vastly outweighs human election experience, vastly outweighs all data Michael Allan has ever seen in his life, etc. So. Either (a) Michael Allan's whole set of ideas is just wrong. (b) Range voting (which the honeybees use) is somehow different and allows escaping Michael Allan's ideas (which could still be right for some other voting systems such as plurality). (c) having political parties somehow would be beyond the ability of honeybees, even though range voting is not beyond their ability; and even though with humans at present political parties are within their ability but range voting is beyond it. MORE EVIDENCE is the fact that various other human countries apparently never got important political parties despite centuries of elections. E.g. Venice, which also used range voting: http://rangevoting.org/VenHist.html Michael Allan completely ignores this evidence, which kind of indicates his great scholarly contribution to political science... falls a bit short. -- Warren D. Smith http://RangeVoting.org <-- add your endorsement (by clicking "endorse" as 1st step) ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
