On Thu, Jul 04, 2013 at 07:18:18PM +0300, Juho Laatu wrote: >> That doesn't sound so different from leveling seats. In the Norwegian >> system, you give each county an extra seat, but this seat is assigned based >> on the difference betweeen the seats so far allocated (on county by county >> basis) and the national apportionment. I'm not sure how the algorithm >> decides which county gets which party's seats, but it's not a simple >> biproportional thing. > > Yes, the end result is probably very similar. The fact that each leveling > seat is tied to one county further reduces the difference (since there are no > "countyless" seats).
About the Norwegian leveling seat algorithm: The leveling seats goes to the party (with at least 4% of the national votes) with the highest quotient. Once a party in a county has received a leveling seat, that county may not receive any more leveling seats. The quotient is calculated as following: (party_county_votes / (party_county_seats * 2 + 1) / (county_votes / county_seats) "county_seats" does not include the leveling seat. Since each county receives 1 leveling seat the result would be fairly close to just increasing the amount of seats in the county by one, but smaller parties who haven't received any seats at all in the county (but got at least 4% of the national votes) have a slight advantage with the leveling seat algorithm as the algorithm use 1 instead of 1.4 as the first divisor. >> I know that it has led to very counterintuitive results (e.g. a party >> getting a seat with only 300 votes). Thus, I would favor actual >> biproportional representation, because it tends to take seats away from a >> party where that party has weak support, and give seats where the party has >> strong support, thus significantly reducing the chance of getting >> counterintuitive results. The biproportional representation algorithm could >> even be limited so it can't change more than n seats, where n is the number >> of counties, thus retaining the balance between national and local >> representation. It might be a bit unintuitive, though, that the seats are >> floating: e.g. a county might get more than one "leveling" seat because that >> reduces the majority that has to be overruled. > > I tend to give highest priority to reaching exact proportionality between > parties at national level. I also don't like any threshold like concepts > since I believe most democracies are stable enough to allow also one or two > representatives of some minor groupings in the parliament. That think that > would do no harm in stable countries like Norway. It is more important to > allow all interest groups to get their own reprsnetatives. If a party received a leveling seat with only 300 votes, then it probably was in Finnmark as that county has a low population, but large area, giving them 5 seats. As for the election threshold, I completely agree with Juho, also minorities should be represented in the parliament. I've never really understood the argument that an increase in parties represented in the parliament will lead to chaos. How the election threshold work in Norway, that's not really what's preventing other parties to be represented (that we're using 1.4 as the first divisor in Sainte-Laguë is what's making it difficult for smaller parties to get a foothold). > I favour systems that are so simple that regular voters can easily understand > how they work. Even though I'm a fan of Ranked Pairs & Condorcet methods, I too share this sentiment. Another argument could be that voters probably would be wary of drastically changing the existing voting system. In the Norwegian voting system, changing it by removing election threshold, increase seats in each county by 1 and remove leveling seats, and possibly reduce the first Sainte-Laguë divisor slightly, say 1.3, while making it possible for voters to rank parties, could greatly help prevent the fear of "wasting" ones vote. Using the counting method mentioned earlier (exclude party with fewest votes, rerun Sainte-Laguë until all remaining parties got at least 1 seat), it's arguably easier to explain than the current one with the leveling seat algorithm. It wouldn't help on the "I can't vote on my favourite party because they [may] cooperate with a party which I don't like", but that's arguably more of an issue with the parliament (or the people) than the voting system, so that's a bit out of scope here. -- Regards, Vidar Wahlberg ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
