Topics created by frenzed

@frenzed If the goal is exact PR then why even have a threshold. I thought we did not want exact PR.

But more on topic I think you are making 2 assumptions you do not know you are making. You assume at all existing parties are independent and uncorrelated. More mathematically, the assumption is that the parties form an orthogonal basis for a political space. This is quite clearly false and I hope I do not need to explain why.

Secondly, by having all of a voters endorsement put towards one party you are preventing exact PR. In fact I would think that in general this effect is larger than the effect you are brining up here. To do this properly you would need to know the vector representation of each voter in the space defined by the parties. Having that you could calculated exact PR.

That's the same idea the German NGO Mehr Demokratie proposes. I proposed a similar modification to MMP that uses approval voting for the direct mandate and multi party choice. The party vote is distributed equally among all approved parties, then all parties that don't reach the threshold are excluded and the vote is distributed equally among the remaining parties.
It has the same effect as a second choice, but with the added benefit that voters don't have to limit their vote to one party.

@frenzed said in Hello from Ed Hitchcock, New Zealander in France:

We need politicians to work in cooperation in groups, because the other option is dictatorship.

I don't see how you arrive at that.

Unless you consider groups to include things like "the Senate," any a particular Congressional committee, or some sort of special interest group that concentrates on a single issue (e.g. the Sierra Club). But those aren't parties. Parties tend to encompass everything, that is, a politician is a member of one party to the exclusion of other parties. That makes everything tribal, as well as correlating things that aren't necessarily correlated in every voters' mind. (for instance, say I am anti-abortion but pro-gun control)

I like the idea that both voters and candidates can consider each issue independently. Parties tend to force them together.

The problem in the US (and in many jurisdictions) is that the elections system freezes out all but two estalished parties.

Sure. Duverger's law. That's because of plurality voting, which I think most of us consider "the enemy."

A recent election for mayor of San Francisco (where I live) had 8 candidates, none of which were affiliated with a party. This worked because there was a ranked choice election. (IRV is not perfect, but it sure is better than plurality).

Some of the candidates "teamed up", advertising together and such. (saying things like "whichever of us you put first, put the other one second") Various special interest groups endorsed one or more candidates, but the candidates weren't "members" of any group, at least not to the exclusion of other groups.

How is that dictatorship? Even if it is for a parliamentary type election (Senate, Congress, board of Supervisors, etc), I don't see how parties are needed or benefit anyone if the election method is resistant to vote splitting.

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