KM wrote: But positioning yourself around the de facto center is dangerous in
  IRV. You might get center-squeezed unless either you or your voters
  start using strategic lesser-evil logic - the same sort of logic
  that IRV was supposed to free you from by "being impervious to
  spoilers".

dlw: the cost of campaigning in "less local" elections is high enuf that it's hard for a major party to get center-squeezed.  And if such did happen, they could reposition to prevent it.  

KM:If the cost of campaigning is high enough that only the two major parties can play the game, then money (what you call $peech) will still have serious influence.

You might say that this is counterbalanced by the more local elections, so that minor parties can grow into major ones and there will be different minor-to-major parties in each location -- but you still have to convince the more local divisions (counties, cities, etc) to use IRV, and so the same problem applies there.

KM:Or in other words: if you're right and there are only two major parties on the national scene (and so no center-squeeze problem), there will still be a center-squeeze problem in, say, Burlington's mayoral elections. Either Burlington has only two major parties (but then where would your more-local accountability come from?) or it has multiple parties, each of which has its own mayoral candidate, and the centermost n of which will be susceptible to center squeeze.

KM:You want local areas to support smaller parties so they can grow and challenge the major parties.

KM: Well, then the local environment must be conducive to growth. If the parties have to strategically balance IRV's center squeeze (which forces them towards the wings) against the voter support they get from moving closer to the center, that's not exactly conducive to such growth. Nor is it so if the voters have to keep the breakdown point of IRV (when minor becomes major) in mind when voting. Can the parties really be as flexible as you'd like when they're facing the additional constraint of having to walk that tightrope produced by the election method itself?

KM: (It might well be that the nature of IRV, plus cost of campaigning means there could only be two national-level parties. I don't think cost of campaigning alone would force there to be only two national-level parties - e.g. France - but the answer to that question isn't critical to what I wrote above. I'm saying that even if we assume what you're saying, you get into trouble on a more local level.)

David L Wetzell wrote:

On Sat, Nov 26, 2011 at 3:20 PM, David L Wetzell <wetzelld <at> gmail.com <mailto:wetzelld <at> gmail.com>> wrote:

  Here's a bunch of responses

 dlw: SL may be more proportional than LR Hare, but since I'm advocating for the use of a mix of single-winner and multi-winner election rules, I have no problems with the former being biased towards bigger parties and the latter being biased somewhat towards smaller parties.  For there's no need to nail PR if PR itself does not nail what we really want PP, proportionality in power.  This is also part of why I prefer small-numbered PR rules (less proportional) that increase the no. of competitive elections and maintain the legislator-constituent relationship.

Proportionality in power is quite well approximated by proportionality
in representation, however. The degree of fit depends on strategy and
coordination: if every member of the assembly votes for himself, it's
near-perfect (within per-issue variance that gets evened out); if
everybody colludes into one or two superparties, then it may diverge
greatly.

At that point, the question is how far you should take PR. From my own
observation, PR as approximation of PP has problems in certain edge
cases (kingmaker parties), but these are rare. Therefore I think that as
long as you patch up the edge cases or make them unlikely - say, by an
explicit threshold or an implicit one such as STV's - you can optimize
for PR within those bounds.

Even if you don't think PR approximates PP, you can use the same
advanced PR method to give seats fairly according to PP instead. Poland
has proposed something like this be done in the Council of the EU, the
proposal saying that each country should have a weight proportional to
the square root of the number of people in the country.

My preference for integrating single-winner and multiwinner (if you're
going to do both in the same context) is then that whatever you decide
to apportion on (power or votes), the single-winner method can take it
into account. It knows about it, and so you play it a bit more safe. If
the multiwinner rule is bad, the single-winner rule can compensate, and
if the single-winner rule is bad, the multiwinner rule can compensate.

If you're risk averse, as you said you might be, that's a good property!

The flipside is that you won't get the optimal result if it turns out
that the real thing you should optimize is whatever either the
single-winner or multiwinner method optimizes. If that is the case, then
the multiwinner or single-winner method (respectively) will only be a
burden and pull you away from your goal.

  KM:You might be able to get something more easily understood yet
  retaining some of the compensation part of the first version, by
  doing something like this: first elect the single winner/s. Then
  start STV with the single winner/s marked as elected (and thus with
  vote transfers already done).

   
 dlw:The rub here is the desirability of guaranteeing that the Condorcet winner is elected.  In "more local" elections that attract less attention, I put less emph on the usefulness of rankings and thereby the Condorcet winner.

The single-winner doesn't *have* to be the CW (although I would prefer
the system to ensure it is). Even if you for some reason thought the
Plurality winner was the best one, and wanted to design the integration
accordingly, you could do STV with the Plurality winner already elected.

  dlw:   1. While all forms of PR fall short of proportionality in
  representation, the best predictor of proportionality is the number
  of contested seats.

   

   KM:The Hix-Johnston-MacLean document states that these effects are
  weak. To quote:
  "Turnout is usually higher at elections in countries with PR than in
  countries without, It also tends to be even higher in PR systems
  with smaller multi-member constituencies, and also tends to be
  higher where citizens can express preferential votes between
  individual politicians from the same political party rather than
  simply choosing between pre-ordered party lists. In general, the
  more choice electors are offered, the greater the likelihood that
  they will turn out and exercise it. However these effects are not
  particularly strong, there is some evidence that highly complex
  electoral systems suppress turnout, and turnout levels may partly
  reflect influences other than the electoral system, for instance in
  some countries voting is compulsory."
  So I don't think you can necessarily draw that conclusion. The
  apparent competitiveness between seats may be lesser (because of
  what I mentioned above in that single-member districts are much more
  win-all/lose-all), but that doesn't mean the real change in voter
  opinion from term to term is any greater in SMD countries.

dlw: I interpret what they're saying is that other factors also come into play that impact the competitiveness of elections.  So my conclusion could still be"useful", even if it abstracts from a lot of real-world stuff that also affects voter-turnout.  The election rules that best guarantee proportionality tend to reduce voter interest in elections, thereby making PR not the key criteria for choosing an election system.

The whole point is that you can't say that it tends to do so.

There are so many other parameters, and the conclusion could just as well align in the favor of "more choices is higher turnout", as they themselves say.

If you wanted to make that conclusion rather than yours, you could point at that PR in the first place gives higher turnout than non-PR; and that countries with ranked balloting types of PR has higher turnout than countries with party list, all else held equal. Sure, ranked balloting type PR tend to have fewer seats, but then the weak "fewer seats -> more turnout" is a correlation, not a causal relationship.

 2. Proportionality in representation does not entail proportionality
 in power and the latter is desired more than the former. As such, it
 seems that minority dissenters will need to use extra-political
 methods (not unlike #OWS) to move the center, regardless of whether
 PR or another mixed system is used.

   

  Proportionality in representation is correlated with proportionality
  in power. The correlation isn't perfect, as Banzhaf and
  Shapley-Shubik's measures make apparent, but to leap on that and
  conclude that proportionality isn't proportional... that's unwarranted.

dlw: But it waters down the desirability of nailing PR even further and opens the door to a greater valuation of other conflicting criteria.  

KM: See above. If you think you should optimize proportionality of something else, feel free to use the fine-honed machinery of PR with a different target than proportionality in numbers. Use square root laws, dynamic programming or simulated annealing (http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.34.6640) to get proportionality by power (under assumptions of great amounts of collusion) if you wish. In any case, you'll get that for which you optimize, instead of a fuzzy perhaps-what-you-want, perhaps-what-you-don't.

  KM:If anything, when proportional representation disagrees with
  proportionality in power, the power favors the minority parties.
  Minor party kingmakers can make themselves costly if they know there
  won't be any coalition without them. Hence the presence of
  thresholds in most PR systems: these keep too minor parties from
  becoming potential kingmakers.
  Over here, the threshold of 4% keeps most "swing parties" (as one
  may call them) out of power. Yet the threshold is soft - even
  parties below 4% of the total vote can get representatives, they
  just don't get MMP-esque compensation on the national level. (Our PR
  system is a bit unusual in this respect: parties get additional
  seats if their per-region seats reflect their national share of the
  vote too badly.) Perhaps you'd want a hard threshold for a less
  homogenous country, but my point is that the problem can be managed.

dlw: Since PR->PP, we deny PR.  My wider point is that American forms of PR takes a different approach to the problem, one that presumes both PR and single-seat elections are in use so that as long as the latter favors bigger parties, PR may be biased somewhat in favor of smaller parties.

I don't know what you mean by "PR->PP". "PR leads to proportionality of power"?

Anyway, if the inaccuracy in PR wrt proportionality of power favors the small parties, there's the small-party bias you want. Use it, then integrate your single-winner method with the PR so that if you against expectations are wrong, the method can still work.

 dlwThese seem to imply that we need not strive for proportionality
 in representation as the gold standard for electoral reform.  If the
 two major parties, with a somewhat disproportionate amount of
 representation, are more dynamic then they'd tend to represent well
 the majority of the population and heed minorities that frame their
 issues respectfully.

   

  KM:Do note, though, that the same Lijphart as you referenced on your
  page, said:
  "If partisan conflict is multidimensional, a two-party system must
  be regarded as an electoral straitjacket that can hardly be regarded
  as democratically superior to a multiparty system reflecting all the
  major issue dimensions." ("Democracies: Patterns of Majoritarian and
  Consensus Government in Twenty-One Countries", 1984, page 114.)

dlw:What if there's a dialectic between multi-dimensionality and single-dimensionality that gets worked out in an ongoing process?  If so then a 2-party system isn't so bad if it need not be the same two parties de jure and de facto and the two major parties together serve as melding(not melting) pot with significant inputs from dissenters/third parties who raise up new dimensions of conflict into our political systems that lead to a repositioning of the de facto two major parties.

KM:I'd imagine Lijphart knows that parties are not static fixed-in-stone things. Beyond this, I don't know what arguments Lijphart employed. Myself, I would say that the difference is like that of a proposal to use market pricing in a corporation versus doing logistics calculations directly: the first gets there in a slower, more roundabout way; the latter goes right to what is needed.

Of course, since I'm not Lijphart, I'm not the same kind of authority and so you could counter more easily. But also note that Lijphart is in favor of multiparty democracy for other reasons, too. To quote Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arend_Lijphart#Major_works ):

"While Lijphart advocated consociationalism primarily for societies deeply divided along ethnic, religious, ideological, or other cleavages, he sees consensus democracy as appropriate for any society. In contrast to majoritarian democracies, consensus democracies have multiparty systems, parliamentarism with oversized (and therefore inclusive) cabinet coalitions, proportional electoral systems, corporatist (hierarchical) interest group structures, federal structures, bicameralism, rigid constitutions protected by judicial review, and independent central banks. These institutions ensure, firstly, that only a broad supermajority can control policy and, secondly, that once a coalition takes power, its ability to infringe on minority rights is limited."

Now you could say that "it'll be different". Okay, but then your particular construction would have to give significantly different outcomes than the range of majoritarian democracies that Lijphart studied.