On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at 8:07 PM, Bryan Mills <[email protected]> wrote: > Now, despite a 50/50 natural split, the rural party has a 60% supermajority. > And, of course, if you draw the district lines differently you can do the > same thing for the urban party.
This was attempted in Ireland, look up Tullymander. They created 4 seat districts where the governing parties had a slight minority (so the split would be 2-2) and 3 seat ones where they had a slight majority (so the split would be 2-1) It blew up in their face, and they lost by a landslide (may of the 4 seaters went 3-1 against them). You are assuming that there is a very narrow band of support for the parties. It is unlikely to be that stable in practice. Even a 5-10% swing would be enough to break the assumptions. In the Tullymander case, a 4 seater with 55% - 45% only needs 5% to swing to a 3-1 disaster, and similarly in a 3 seater, a 55% - 45% only needs 5% change to change which part gets the final seat. > So there's still relatively little hope that a system with such small > districts would produce a party-proportional legislature. As you point out > elsewhere, it might still be possible to get an ideologically-proportional > legislature if you can get the parties themselves to shift ideologies. Another issue is that a seat might be party safe, but not politician safe. Your party might be guaranteed 2 seats, but not you. Politicians would need to keep the locals happy (this has pluses and minuses). A party can decide only to run 2 candidates in 5 seaters, but then they give up getting a majority. > They do maintain the constituent-legislator relationship, *for the subset of > voters who voted in favor of the legislator*. For the remaining Droop quota > of un- or under-represented constituents the nonexistence of the > constituent-legislator relationship is also maintained. However, that is smaller, down from up to 50% to up to 1/(seats + 1) of the voters. ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
