On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 12:51:02PM +0200, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: > I don't have proof that it wouldn't degenerate into a raw populist > competition, though, so I can certainly see your point. I just don't > know of any examples of STV-like methods failing or leading to raw > populism in the countries where they're used.
Likewise, I don't have any proof that it will degenerate into a populist competition, but I do see the potential that it will, when you vote directly for a person rather than a party. I strongly suspect that people will vote for highly charismatic people which may not reflect their political skill. The abstraction layer of letting a party order the list may result in more experienced politicians at top, but this is purely a theory, I have no evidence to support it. > When used as a party list method, ordinary STV reduces to largest > remainder party list with a Droop quota. So if that's what you want, > just use largest remainder. Intriguing, obviously this is what I've done, but instead of running x cycles to allocate one and one seat for those above the quota I just did a shortcut allocating n seats in one cycle. I'm surprised how something as obvious as this flew by me, thanks for pointing it out! > But that wouldn't fix the unfairness in Norwegian party allocations > either. I think your footnote #2 is closer to the mark, and the > unfairness (while much slighter than in the US, obviously) has three > parts. The three parts are the leveling seat algorithm, how the > party list method acts when there are few seats, and the threshold. It may have been implied, but I would also add that the lack of ranking parties in your vote is the bigger contributor to the unfairness. In 2009, "Rødt" (for those not familiar with Norwegian parties: "Rødt" is a radical left-wing oriented party) was 1083 votes from gaining a seat for Oslo county, instead the last seat went to "Høyre" (conservative right-wing oriented party). I'm fairly sure you'll agree with me that those 12917 people who voted for "Rødt" most likely would rather see that last seat go to someone else. If those people instead had voted for "SV" (left-wing, close to "Rødt"), that would be more than enough to take that seat from "Høyre" and give it to "SV". > I've never quite understood how the leveling seat algorithm works, > and it often produces counterintuitive results. I think it would be > better to just have "regional seats" that belong to a region rather > than to a county. One would then apportion the local seats, and > afterwards compare the results for a region with the results that > region "should" have, giving out regional seats to compensate. The > only problem with that scheme is to find out where the regional > seats should be located, and from which list/s the regional MPs > should be drawn. The leveling seat algorithm is... peculiar. It's some time since I read up on it, but one thing I do recall was the ambiguous explanation on where these seats are to be distributed. As you probably know there were fewer leveling seats (8) some years ago (1989-2005), but this was later changed to "one leveling seat per county". When there was 8 then not all counties would get a leveling seat, but rather the county where a party above the election threshold were nearest to receive a directly appointed seat. Now that there are 19 leveling seats it seems to be that each county gets its very own leveling seat, but as far as I remember the rules, it doesn't actually say that each county gets 1 leveling seat. Infact as I understood the rules one county could get multiple leveling seats, for instance if it had two parties above the election threshold, where both parties where very close to get a directly appointed seat. This is obviously not how it's done, each county do get one leveling seat, but this is not explained well in the rules. I'm derailing here, returning to the subject. > As for how the party list method acts when there are few seats, this > is probably closer to the problem you're seeing (when one disregards > leveling seats). Here's an old example I often pull in similar > cases: > > 46: L > C > R > 44: R > C > L > 10: C > R > L > > In the extreme case of there being only one seat, you would want C > to win. But every divisor method reduces to Plurality when there's > only one seat, so L gets elected instead. On the other hand, if you > have a thousand seats, proportional representation pretty much says > you should give 46% of them to L (were it a party), 44% to R, and > 10% to C. > > So we'd like a method that is Condorcetian when there's only one > seat, yet proportional when there are loads. And such methods exist. > Schulze's proportional ordering method comes to mind. It's complex, > however, and it might be possible to make simpler methods since we > can elect each "candidate" (party) multiple times. This gave me an idea. We seem to agree that it's notably the exclusion part that may end up excluding a party that is preferred by many, but just isn't their first preference. I'm sticking to quota election because I don't fully grasp how to apply other methods (Sainte-Laguë, for instance) to determine when to start excluding parties. 1. Give seats to parties exceeding the quota (seats = votes / quota) 2. Create an ordered list using Ranked Pairs/Beatpath, exclude the least preferred party and redistribute its votes. Repeat. Using your example above, since neither L, C nor R reach the quota, you would order them using i.e. Ranked Pairs. A quick glance tells me that the order would be C > R > L, L is excluded and its votes goes to C. New tally would give C 56 votes which would be enough to win the election (exceeding the quota). Any thoughts on this? Sorry about not commenting on the rest of your reply, I read it with interest, although I'd like to get rid of both leveling seats and election threshold. The goals behind these concepts I feel are well met with a preferential election (with the exception of fragmentation, but that is a fairly poor argument, as I believe only "Rødt" would be the new addition to the parliament if it wasn't for these aspects of our voting system). -- Regards, Vidar Wahlberg ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
