When Lobbying was Illegal • Hacker News Board

Re: When Lobbying was Illegal

#161

Post by whiddershins » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 4:12 PM UTC

wildmusings wrote: post #61

Alphasite_ wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not do what is done in the UK and put spending limits in place?

Because ultimately a spending limit boils down to "you're not allowed to air this film" because you already spent too much. In fact, that's exactly what the Citizens United case was. We have a Bill of Rights which guarantees that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, the right of the people to peaceably assemble, or the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

This.

It drives me crazy that people don't understand Citizens United was about free speech. And most people who say they don't like the ruling reverse positions once I explain exactly what it was about. Stopping a film maker from making or airing a political film seems horrible to me.

Re: When Lobbying was Illegal

#162

Post by johnchristopher » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 9:15 PM UTC

gozur88 wrote: post #153

johnchristopher wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In France and Belgium the total amount of money you can spend on your campaign is regulated and financed by the state. Which of course leads to another kind of problems.

How do you deal with third parties? In the US every time we try to limit what politicians can spend, the money goes instead to "independent" single-issue groups.

In Belgium there are enough parties that not a single one can grasp 51% of the votes. Moreover since the country consists of two linguistic communities with their own set of different parties (there isn't any national, translinguistic parties anymore) there is always the need for build a « coalition » or a « majority » between parties that then form a government. edit: in Belgium we don't have a presidential body. We vote for the federal parliament, parties gather together to see who's going to ally with who to reach a majority and then those parties build a government by picking up ministers from their rank. If during the legislature a party should break away from that majority in the parliament then the government would fall and there would need to either form a new majority or call for anticipated elections. (that's a gross approximation of the legislative process)

The situation is more contrasted and antagonistic in France where the left (PS: Socialist Party) and the right (LR: The republicans) are so huge they don't share the power (at least in the government). In Belgium we can have left and right ministers at the same time depending on which party entered the coalition. In France the government is basically either from the right or the left. The parliament is more nuanced.

Both countries have a senate with elected members (who make up groups as well).

I don't know if it answers your question though.

Re: When Lobbying was Illegal

#163

Post by danieltillett » Sun, Apr 17, 2016, 11:25 PM UTC

aninhumer wrote: post #129

danieltillett wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not how the system works for in example Australia. What happens is the votes for the lowest ranked candidate are given to all the second choice candidates and the process repeated until you get a candidate with 50% of the vote. There is no way that placing your preferred candidate first can ever result in your vote not being given in the order you choose. If you prefer candidate X above candidate y then candi…

Yes, I understand how IRV works, and indeed I used to believe it was flawless. >There is no way that placing your preferred candidate first can ever result in your vote not being given in the order you choose. No, but it can end up harming your second choice, by eliminating them early, so your vote for them doesn't matter. This is called Favourite Betrayal, and it's a serious problem with IRV: https://www.youtube.com…

These type of contrived examples appear to occur rarely in practice. I would love to see some bootstrap simulations on real IRV elections results to see how sensitive IRV is to these pathological outcomes. Most of the time you are only interested in which of the major candidates gets your second choice.

Re: When Lobbying was Illegal

#164

Post by gozur88 » Tue, Apr 19, 2016, 6:20 AM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #162

gozur88 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you deal with third parties? In the US every time we try to limit what politicians can spend, the money goes instead to "independent" single-issue groups.

In Belgium there are enough parties that not a single one can grasp 51% of the votes. Moreover since the country consists of two linguistic communities with their own set of different parties (there isn't any national, translinguistic parties anymore) there is always the need for build a « coalition » or a « majority » between parties that then form a government. edit: in Belgium we don't have a presidential body. We…

I see I wasn't clear. When I said third parties, I didn't mean political parties, I meant it in the more literal sense. That is, groups that aren't technically affiliated with a political party. In the US you can't always tell what the group is by the name, e.g. "People for a Better Tomorrow" or "Alliance for Children" or "People Who Care More Than You". Well, okay, I made the last one up, but only just.

Anyway, when you limit money going to politicians it goes to these sorts of groups instead. Then they turn around and buy air time supporting whoever funded them. If you limit money to those groups (which isn't constitutional anyway), you get money supporting dubious university research and "think tanks". And so on. If all those are limited, people start buying media organizations.

The point being it doesn't seem like there's any way to remove or even curtail the influence of money in politics. All they can seem to do is move it around. That's why I'm curious what sort of legal environment Belgium has in place to prevent that.

Re: When Lobbying was Illegal

#165

Post by aninhumer » Fri, Apr 22, 2016, 7:28 PM UTC

danieltillett wrote: post #163

aninhumer wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I understand how IRV works, and indeed I used to believe it was flawless. >There is no way that placing your preferred candidate first can ever result in your vote not being given in the order you choose. No, but it can end up harming your second choice, by eliminating them early, so your vote for them doesn't matter. This is called Favourite Betrayal, and it's a serious problem with IRV: https://www.youtube.com…

These type of contrived examples appear to occur rarely in practice. I would love to see some bootstrap simulations on real IRV elections results to see how sensitive IRV is to these pathological outcomes. Most of the time you are only interested in which of the major candidates gets your second choice.

I don't know if they're that contrived. The scenario is that you have a closely matched two party system (as most FPTP places do) and a third party which is close in popularity to one of the mainstream ones on first votes, but is not universally supported by the remaining mainstream voters over the other mainstream party.

That doesn't just sound plausible, it sounds like exactly the pattern of growth for a third party that you'd expect.