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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   28484 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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I agree that the Wikipedia article is quite illustrative.

I think I have a few objections to STV over simple proportional representation with party lists.

  • I don't care for districts. The idea to physically visit my representative's office in town would never cross my mind, the internet exists. The only thing districts exist for are redirecting federal gravy trains to their constituents. I have no problem with voters voting for someone from their own city or state, but that should be their choice, not pre-baked in the election system.
  • If you put all the candidates for a parliament onto the ballot so I can rank the candidates who I actually care for, that will be a bloody long ballot. There are 733 representatives in the Bundestag, the number of candidates per seat are likely higher by a factor of five or so.
  • While Arrow's theorem affects all voting systems, it does not affect all voting systems equally in practice. With party-list proportional representation, if I have an oracle of how everyone else will vote, there is just so much strategy I can apply. You could check if your vote will influence the possible coalitions (which would be very unlikely but also very powerful), but otherwise, you vote for whatever party best represents your values. (Without an oracle, it is generally a mix of both of these considerations.) However, with STV, strategic votes matter a lot. Suppose my preferred candidate is very popular, and I expect a ton of people to vote for them, so he gets x>q votes, where q is the quota for election. This means that in the next round, my vote will be discounted by factor of (x-q)/x. So if I know beforehand that my preferred candidate will get elected, it would be rational not to vote for them, and instead put all my efforts into backing my next preference. However, this strategy is not stable -- if everyone assumes that their preferred candidate will win anyhow, nobody will vote for them.
  • In list-based proportional representation, the one thing keeping representatives in line is that if they don't vote along the party line, they might not find themselves on a favorably spot on the list for the next election. The deal offered by parties is basically: 'be our straw man for voting in parliament, in exchange you get to shape (party) policy in some area and have a relaxed job with good compensation and little heavy lifting'. If there are no lists and getting elected depends on the population searching for your name on the ballot, incentives change dramatically. Your most likely competitors for votes are your colleagues in your party. Your best strategy is to throw them under the bus. If your party is woke, accuse them of being racists. The resulting equilibrium would be that you no longer have parties (yay!), but instead have a parliament filled with 700 independent representatives who were the most successful at selling their own brand like some youtubers. Now imagine having to find a majority coalition among the top 700 youtubers.

While I am a strong proponent of 'one person, one vote' for electing parliament, I don't think it is required that every representative shares the same voting power in parliament. Instead of transferring votes, one could simply say that if a candidate reaches x>q votes, their voting power in parliament will simply be scaled by factor x/q. You would get much smaller fractions where a few key players of each party make up most of the votes, plus perhaps a few hanger-ons whose main appeal is that they represent niche interests, plus some popular independents.

Finally, you are correct that changing voting systems is hard. The powers that be have formed in response to the present voting systems. While it is sometimes in their best interests to change particulars to entrench their party interests (e.g. gerrymandering) it will almost never be in the interest of a supermajority to fundamentally change the voting system, especially not in a way which lets in outsiders.

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