Proportional Representation

VRWCAgent said:

We do have proportional representation. It's the House of Representatives. I vote for the man or woman I want to represent me. If those of like mind hold the day, my guy or gal wins. One person, one vote, for one person. All of those other ridiculous systems for counting votes or voting have no place in America, period.

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I suppose that logic makes sense... but why discount the views of 49% just because 51% voted for the other guy? Isn't America founded on ensuring that both the minority and majority have nearly-equal power(i.e. the bicameral Congress)?

VRWCAgent said:

Because I don't want it here.

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What about if the majority of your state chose to enact proportional representation for their state?

Or, to test the states' rights position, what if California, for instance, chose to use proportional representation when sending people to the House?

BasketCase said:

Pretty much. Right now white people are getting zero representation by the President.

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...I have no idea how to reply to this. Representation should be based solely on political views, not race. Race has no place in government.

PiMan said:

Proportional voting allows minor parties to gain some sort of vote in line with the number of people who actually want the party to have a vote. (and by party, I mean people in the party)

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Precisely, and in the case of the United States, as we supposedly value the ability of the majority and minority to have fairly equal power(via a bicameral legislature giving strength to the large states and small states), it makes no sense to not take into account the minority viewpoints.

mangxema said:

There is a valid argument to be made for districts, which I think is what VRWC is referring to. Most states are sufficiently large to have a fairly diverse population, and by making the constituency smaller, you can in some sense guarantee a more accurate representation. In my [formerly] home state of Georgia, for example, there is the metropolis of Atlanta, a few smaller cities, and a bunch of farmland/nothing depending on the area. It would be difficult to argue that the people who grew up in cities and live in cities could truly represent the rural districts; the opposite is also true. Thus by limiting the area, in many areas you can effectively exclude the other.

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I suppose... but what if one district leans heavily Republican, and the other Democrat, but between them, there's enough for a Libertarian seat, but the winner-takes-all system prevents this?

That is why I hate districting. It keeps the third parties from racking up even one or two seats(not counting the occassional independent in Congress). If we base the results on votes alone and pretty much dissolve borders for the sake of the election, then it ensures that most relevant views are represented.

If there were a party list, my concern would be that wherever the power center is, that kind of politician would be overrepresented. To some extent, you might be able to offset this with different 'lifestyle' parties (e.g., a farmers' party) but this is the US we're talking about so I do not really see that happening.

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Ideally, for me, each party would choose it's candidates through internal democracy, akin to how candidates win the primary elections and then are presented to the national elections.

@ Elta
No, that is a horrible idea. Anything party-based is bad. Also, I suspect the constitutional amendment required for that would be harder to pass than one simply abolishing the senate.

@PiMan
Range voting isn't really that complex (perhaps just enough to discourage total idiots who have done no research from voting), and is far more transparent when it comes to counting. Counting and recounting IRV votes is more complex,expensive, and prone to fraud. In IRV there are many cases where being dishonest and ranking your favorite candidate lower can help him win. There is no way to express an equal preference for multiple candidates in IRV. IRV has been shown to reinforce 2 party dominance even more than plurality voting, while encouraging losing parties to stick around and (often) suck up public funding for their campaigns.





IIrc, there are very few limits on how a state may choose to run its elections, and the federal laws that do limit it are of rather dubious constitutionality. I think the Supreme Court ruled against having multimember districts, but I don't think their reasoning would have made any sense in a range voting system. I'd rather move to Range Voting though an amendment to the US Constitution (which might also get rid of the electoral college, as that body has not served its purpose in a long time), but we can certainly try to do it state by state.

MagisterCultuum said:

Counting and recounting IRV votes is more complex,expensive, and prone to fraud. In IRV there are many cases where being dishonest and ranking your favorite candidate lower can help him win.

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Say what now.

I've never heard of an incident of fraud or miscounting by the Australian Electoral Commission and I can't think of a way for giving your preferred candidate a lower preference to be more effective than giving them your first.

Ok, maybe it isn't as bad as I remmebered, but it still isn't great.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRV#Fails_the_monotonicity_criterion

Oh I see. That's... really not an issue at all unless you have a sizeable number of really counter-intuitive voters swinging wildly in their preferences between, say, hard left and hard right candidates.

MagisterCultuum said:

IRV has been shown to reinforce 2 party dominance even more than plurality voting.

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Where has that been shown?

It's neutral on it, but it allows people who don't vote for the two major parties to still express a preference between them. As a Greens voter it frees me from the terrible choice between either supporting the party I actually support or voting Labor just to keep the Liberals out.

To use an American example, preference voting in the 1992 or 2000 presidential campaigns would have allowed Perot or Green voters to still support either the Democrats or Republicans whilst voting for the person they actually want to vote for. You wouldn't have had the stupid sight of Democrat supporters blaming the Greens for Bush getting elected.

Incidentally, the under the name "alternative vote" the Irish president is elected by preference voting/IRV.

Within single-member districts (or an inherently single-person position like the presidency), preference voting is the best way to ensure the most preferred candidate wins whilst not discouraging minor party participation. You can talk about whatever perfect-theoretical-never-tried pie-in-the-sky systems you want, but as a realistic achievable reform in existing first-past-the-post single-member constituency systems preferences are a good solution.

I think, as I said, they'd be especially advantageous in the UK and Canada with their three and four party systems.

Arwon said:

It's neutral on it, but it allows people who don't vote for the two major parties to still express a preference between them. As a Greens voter it frees me from the terrible choice between either supporting the party I actually support or voting Labor just to keep the Liberals out.

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Yeah, it counteracts/mitigates the effects of vote splitting, which is why I don't understand how it could reinforce a two-party system.

I think, as I said, they'd be especially advantageous in the UK and Canada with their three and four party systems.

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Definitely. It's pretty sad when, in order to prevent the worst of evils from winning an electoral district, you have to vote for a secessionist party..

PiMan said:

When you vote, you're not voting for a healthcare reform, your voting for a person who you will expect will vote on legislation in line with how they campaigned and hopefully that is in line with why you voted for them.

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Health care was just an example to get the point across. Strike "health care" and replace it with any other issue or any person, and the problem remains the same. When you vote for a person who you expect will vote on legislation in line with their campaign, the people who lose that vote are stripped of representation.

Take a look at the U.S. Senate for another example of how it goes wrong. On November 6th 2009, the U.S. Senate was two-thirds Democrats. Assume just for kicks that this Congress really did perfectly represent the proportion of votes won in the U.S.: two-thirds were Democrats and one-third were Republicans.

What was the actual result in the U.S. Senate? Simple: every American had a fair share of representation in Congress, but the Democrats had all the power, and the Republicans had none. Again, that changed when Brown won an upset in Massachusetts, but the Republicans still have far less than their "fair share" of power in the Senate. Proportional voting is not possible.

We're talking about electoral systems, not the deficiencies of majoritarian legislative decision-making process. "Sometimes parties have to be in opposition and lose votes" is not an argument against, nor for, any particular electoral system.

But even then, there's degrees of representativeness and proportionality, and proportional voting with multi-member districts provides more of it than first-past-the-post single-member districts.

Proportional voting is far more likely to deliver a house where no party has an absolute majority. This leads to negotiations, compromises and coalitions. Result: a less zero-sum, less winner-takes-all legislative house and a less polarised, black and white, us-vs-them party system.

BasketCase said:

Proportional representation is impossible.

In any election, there must be at least one loser. And all citizens who voted for the loser get no representation at all. Do away with government completely, and power reverts to whoever is physically strongest.

Democracy is as close as we can get. Deal with it and quit whining.

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You've got democracy and authoritarianism backwards. Authoritarianism is the system wherein political power is wielded by whatever elitist group can force the rest of society to obey it, whereas democracy is the system where political power is evenly distributed to all (i.e. what happens when you "do away with government completely").

So, what you really mean to say is that you, like the majority of H. sapiens, believe that you are in one of the upper percentiles wrt general "good" traits of intelligence, morality, competence, etc. (which is rather ironic, since statistically only a fraction of the people who hold this belief can be correct from an objective standpoint) and therefore any system which does not subject the incompetent masses to the enlightened rule of those innately superior persons such as yourself must result in the total collapse of all civilization. I suppose when you put it like this, it sounds more ignorant and illogical than when you just repeatedly mis-define anarchism as being equivalent to rule by a system of tribal warlords, but, nonetheless, it is more truthful this way.

From what I can gather, some of the Americans dislike of proportional representation is historical. Some parts of the US did introduce it in varying forms and guises, but it had the unpalatable result of giving "undesirables" (blacks, hispanics, socialists, communists, feminists, etc.) representation. Even though America has moved forward since then, dislike of PR remained.

Arwon said:

Proportional voting is far more likely to deliver a house where no party has an absolute majority. This leads to negotiations, compromises and coalitions.

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Actual result: negotiations, compromises and coalitions that strip all political power away from whoever is not part of those negotiations, compromises or coalitions.

I've SEEN the system you describe already in action in many countries around the world. And the same problem crops up in those other nations as in the United States. The U.S. Congress does negotiations, compromises and coalitions too. The number of parties in the system has nothing to do with it.

Gustave5436 said:

You've got democracy and authoritarianism backwards. Authoritarianism is the system wherein political power is wielded by whatever elitist group can force the rest of society to obey it, whereas democracy is the system where political power is evenly distributed to all

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Nope. Democracy is when everybody has the right to make a choice on a ballot. As I keep saying, it is not possible to distribute political power evenly to all.

Gustave5436 said:

So, what you really mean to say is that you, like the majority of H. sapiens, believe that you are in one of the upper percentiles wrt general "good" traits of intelligence, morality, competence, etc.

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I do happen to be above average in those traits, but no. That's not what I was saying.

BasketCase said:

Actual result: negotiations, compromises and coalitions that strip all political power away from whoever is not part of those negotiations, compromises or coalitions.

I've SEEN the system you describe already in action in many countries around the world. And the same problem crops up in those other nations as in the United States. The U.S. Congress does negotiations, compromises and coalitions too. The number of parties in the system has nothing to do with it.

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OK, you've identified a Bad Thing that is an inherent characteristic of all majoritarian legislative systems, that opposition representatives are shut out of decision-making. But the thing is, that very same Bad Thing exists to a greater extent under our single-member FPTP systems than under multi-member prop rep systems. So:

Other System has less Bad Thing than Current System, therefore "Other System has Bad Thing" doesn't work as an argument.

The point is you get less widely spread representation and less proportionality of votes to power in single-member first-past-the-post systems than multi-member proportional systems. More voters get reps in power who they voted for, more parties get into power, absolute majorities are harder to achieve. Look at Germany for example, the major parties have mostly all governed in coalition with each other at one point or another.

So I'm not sure what you're saying here.

Is your contention simply that having wide representation doesn't matter since some parties don't get into power? Or is it that since we can't achieve absolutely perfectly distributed power for everyone at all times, that we shouldn't care about relative degrees of representation and power distribution at all?

Arwon said:

OK, you've identified a Bad Thing that is an inherent characteristic of all majoritarian legislative systems, that opposition representatives are shut out of decision-making. But the thing is, that very same Bad Thing exists to a greater extent under our single-member FPTP systems than under multi-member prop rep systems.

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Nope. Attempts at greater proportionality have the same problem to the same extent.

Take Israel, for example. There are five parties in the Knesset--and look at Israel's history. Swinging back and forth from peacemaking to beat-the-crap-out-of-Palestine-making. At any given time, one Israeli faction has all the decision-making power, and the other has none. Having five parties doesn't improve anything. It doesn't make it any worse, but it's not an improvement either.

Actually in Israel there's 11 parties with seats at the moment, and they illustrate my point perfectly. Israel has nearly always had coalition governments and unity governments, it's never just one party with no support and untrammelled power. Right now, Likud has 27 out of 120 Knesset seats. They do not govern alone and politics are a lot more fluid than a system where one party can just run everything.

If they want to do something they need the support from other parties, usually the right wing allies but not necessarily. Look at Ariel Sharon and Kadima. In order to break an impasse on an issue, what happened was the formation of a new party with a new platform, capable of success, capable of being a circuit-breaker, drawing in elements from different previous parties. This is possible in Israel. It's simply not possible in the US or Australia, and there's no way you can argue that the functioning of their parties and parliament are as fixed and all-or-nothing as Australian or US equivalents.

Similarly, people are able to vote for parties which mirror their views with far more precision than is possible in the US or Australia and get represented. Which is really good.

BasketCase said:

Actual result: negotiations, compromises and coalitions that strip all political power away from whoever is not part of those negotiations, compromises or coalitions.

I've SEEN the system you describe already in action in many countries around the world. And the same problem crops up in those other nations as in the United States. The U.S. Congress does negotiations, compromises and coalitions too. The number of parties in the system has nothing to do with it.

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The negotiations would be between different groups each time though.
Party A and B might agree on issue 1; party A and C on issue 2; and party B and C on issue 3.
Depending on the ratios of representatives each party, all three issues might have legislation passed. All people have had their representation.
Without an electoral system that encourages multi-party legislative houses, you are more likely to get party A and B passing issue 1, party A passing issue 2 because it has the majority, and party B failing to pass issue 3 because it is the minority.

Arwon said:

Right now, Likud has 27 out of 120 Knesset seats. They do not govern alone and politics are a lot more fluid than a system where one party can just run everything.

If they want to do something they need the support from other parties, usually the right wing allies but not necessarily.

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There ya go. Stuff can get done while completely ignoring the right-of-center. THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED IN THE U.S. WITH HEALTH CARE REFORM.

Here's another good one. Right about the time Obama was elected, but before he was sworn in, Israel invaded Gaza in order to get one more punch in before Obama had a chance to make things difficult for Israel. That's the Israeli right doing something against the will of the peacefully-inclined people of Israel, without their consent.

BasketCase said:

There ya go. Stuff can get done while completely ignoring the right-of-center. THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED IN THE U.S. WITH HEALTH CARE REFORM.

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In a multiparty system, it probably couldn't get passed as is. It is too far left for the Republicans and any other right wing parties that get elected, but it would be too far right for any left wing parties that get elected. The Democrats would have the option of negotiating a milder version of the legislation to get enough right wing congressmen on board, or a more extensive version to get enough left wing congressmen on board.

And don't say that they wouldn't try to negotiate a milder version, as a similar situation has recently occurred in the Australian senate. In many issues, the Labor Party will try to get the support of the left wing parties like the Greens to get the majority they need, however with the emissions trading scheme they have been doing their best to negotiate with the Liberal Party (remembering that Liberal in Australia is like Republican in the US).

BasketCase said:

There ya go. Stuff can get done while completely ignoring the right-of-center. THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED IN THE U.S. WITH HEALTH CARE REFORM.

Here's another good one. Right about the time Obama was elected, but before he was sworn in, Israel invaded Gaza in order to get one more punch in before Obama had a chance to make things difficult for Israel. That's the Israeli right doing something against the will of the peacefully-inclined people of Israel, without their consent.

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So wait, your issue now is with the very heterogeneity of opinion that exists in democracies and the fact that everyone can't get their way at the same time?

You can either have a system which reinforces this problem, or you can have a system which ameliorates it somewhat through the things we've identified - coalitions, more fluid party dynamics, more voters getting a party they actually support representing them.