On 01/31/2012 07:05 AM, Bryan Mills wrote:
On Wed, Jan 25, 2012 at 12:52 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
<[email protected]> wrote:
I think it is strategy-proof, but I wonder if people would irrationally
reason something like this:
"My chance of winning is very low, so I shouldn't keep my hopes up. Instead,
I should delegate my vote so that I can feel I expressed myself if [popular
candidate] wins."
Now, that makes no sense, but if people were game-theoretically rational,
turnout would be very low (and it isn't). So I'm wondering if the people
would irrationally be more mass-like than you'd want of a sortition-based
system.
Moderate clustering of votes is desirable, and leads to lower-variance outcomes
(because the count proceeds further on average before hitting the
max-seats limit).
That's among several reasons why you would want a large number of
seats; probably on the order of 400-500 for a practical legislature.
Voters could hopefully find a fairly close match among the
several-hundred front-runners -- much closer than would be possible
in a single-winner or even a typical STV election, especially since
they wouldn't have to spend time figuring out a rank-ordering of
less-preferred candidates.
Alright, I misunderstood a bit what you were trying to do. I thought
that you wanted sortition with its essential features (representative
sample of the population, incorruptability) but with a fix to keep those
who themselves did not want to serve from being unrepresented. I
envisioned that voters who did not want to serve would (ideally) name a
friend or relative or something like that, so any given candidate would
have less than ten votes.
By what you're saying, since you mention Droop quotas and analogies to
STV, as well as "representative sample of preferences for
representation", it seems you're coming at it from an election method
angle - i.e. you want something like STV but without the hassle of
filling in a 400-candidate ballot, and with no incentive for strategy
whatsoever.
Is that right?
In general, I don't think one can solve the "elected candidates
ignore their constituency" problem completely with any long-period
election system. If you want to solve that problem you'd need voters
to be able to change their delegations midway through a term, and
while I think that's a very interesting line of investigation it
doesn't satisfy my initial objective of "conventional
infrastructure". (That is, any system that completely solves the
ignored-constituency problem presents more substantial technical
barriers to adoption than does DS.)
You could mitigate it by having staggered elections. You could have an
election for 1/kth of the assembly 1/kth of the term, kind of like the
interleaving of US executive and legislative elections. Beyond that,
you're probably right.
It may be fairly unlikely that your vote would "pull the candidate
in your direction", but that's kind of the point of using a
proportional system instead of a single-winner district system.
Rather than attempting to move the position of a consensus
candidate, voters can instead seek a candidate whose views are
already suitably close to their own.
You could move the position of your candidate, I think. In, say, STV, if
you're a socialist and prefer the socialist party, you may still prefer
the leftmost SP candidate - and if the other SP candidates know that,
they may move further to the left. The feedback is not as strong,
granted, but I think that's an advantage STV (and other multiwinner
party-neutral methods) have over party list.
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