61–70 of 78 posts
Proportional representation can used in the executive branch too. Switzerland does it.
Some of you are forgetting something; that even if you had some form of "stadistical fairness" (whatever that may be); you still have the biggest problem of most democracies: Uneducated people; people who think an atheist shouldn't be president, people who like to reinforce their biases more than they like to have deep discussions about the nation's issues, people who were never taught to do critical thinking... and…
That's not really in scope for choosing a voting system that best represents the people. But yes, point taken.
I've always thought New Zealand's mixed-member proportional (MMP) voting system [1] is the least bad solution currently in use. I'm not from NZ so I'd be interested to hear what the locals think. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Zealand_voting_system_refer...
Not a local, but... Proportional voting systems suffer from the problem that voting "power" is not proportional to representation. Consider a parliament with 100 members and 3 parties. Suppose the breakdown is: A has 49 members, B has 48 members, and C has 3 members. Guess what... A, B, and C all have equal voting power! Any two parties are enough to reach a majority of 51 votes, and any one party is not. Despite A h…
To form a government, the party with the most votes, or a coalition of parties which collectively holds a majority petition the governor general.
For a single party this is quite straightforward.
To form a coalition the member parties agree on a 'Confidence and supply agreement" This is basically a statement that in the event of a vote of no-confidence, all of the coalitions members will support the coalition, and also a broad agreement on the budget. Getting an agreement on confidence usually involves a certain amount of horse trading about ministerial and vice ministerial positions. Likewise, the agreement on supply will probably involve some intense budget and joint-policy negotiations.
If you had a parliament of 101 seats, split into an opposition of 50 seats, and a government of 51, itself made up of a large party (48 seats) and a small party (3 seats) what you will probably see is the small party only has the tiniest influence on the coalition agreement. They probably traded everything else to get their senior member a ministerial position.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Pointless for what purpose?
> Pointless for what purpose? I'm beginning to think you don't understand how the Electoral College works, but maybe Montana wasn't the best example. Pointless for the purpose of electing a President. The odds of Montana casting any of its electoral votes for a Democratic candidate are so low that it is essentially impossible for an individual Montanan voting for a Democratic Presidential candidate to have any actual…
You seem to believe that the purpose of voting for the POTUS is to elect the President.
This is wrong. The purpose of participating in the national election is not to "pick the best choice". It is to make a decision and to express an opinion.
The purpose of voting for the POTUS is to provide a signal to your electoral college delegates, and to provide a signal for the mood of the nation. In the case you describe, it's like submitting a minority opinion on the SCOTUS. The point is to be on record with your opinion, not to be the Important Guy Whose Vote Makes the Difference. It's to say, "Yes, we decided on Obama, but a huge portion of the country would have preferred Romney for one reason or another," or vice versa.
If your opinion happens to coincide with a majority as filtered through the electoral college, then your opinion happens to coincide with the result of an aggregate decision machine. You are not The Decider. There is no Decider. That is the point of a democracy: no single vote can, or should, ever count.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you examine these supposed failures of Approval voting, you'll find that the bulk of them can be attributed to the divide between a "Majoritarian" or a "Consensus-driven" perspective. That is, many of the criteria suppose that the most-preferred candidate of the majority should win, but should that be the case? Imagine there are 3 candidates, one who is adored by the super-majority, a second who is very well-liked…
> Given 2 systems, one which exhibits several flaws often, and another which rarely exhibits flaws but is theoretically capable of exhibiting a certain offensive flaw, does it make sense to reject the better-behaving system because of a theoretical result? I think not No, but if we want to go on the basis of how likely it is to produce those outcomes, Instant-runoff voting beats approval voting by a long shot. Amarty…
This is off. Voting is not a system for selecting the best candidate. Voting, in whatever forms it exists, is a system to avoid violence and conflict. Each side feels it had a fair shot, regardless of outcome. The purpose of voting is to leave you with that feeling, to avoid unpleasant behavior from the losing party. The best person for the job almost never gets it. That's why we don't vote people in when hiring some…
This is off. Voting is not a system for selecting the best candidate. Voting, in whatever forms it exists, is a system to avoid violence and conflict. Each side feels it had a fair shot, regardless of outcome. The purpose of voting is to leave you with that feeling, to avoid unpleasant behavior from the losing party. The best person for the job almost never gets it. That's why we don't vote people in when hiring some…
There's also the useful property that if everyone votes based on their own selfish interests, the winner will serve the interests of more people than any other candidate.
The bigger problem is that there's a logical disconnect between your two clauses. The fact that people vote based on their own selfish interests does NOT actually guarantee the winner will serve their interests. It only would do so if people were really good judges of character and politicians were bad at lying and there were some reliable way to hold politicians to account for what they do.
Politicians lie about what they want to do, and we vote for them because we like the lies they tell. When everyone votes for the liar who promises to help everyone's own selfish interest, we get an unusually good liar who actually pursues his own interests when elected.
In the Bush v. Gore debate, Bush claimed to be firmly opposed to "nation-building". People who voted for Bush on that basis did NOT get a winner who was serving their interests.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you examine these supposed failures of Approval voting, you'll find that the bulk of them can be attributed to the divide between a "Majoritarian" or a "Consensus-driven" perspective. That is, many of the criteria suppose that the most-preferred candidate of the majority should win, but should that be the case? Imagine there are 3 candidates, one who is adored by the super-majority, a second who is very well-liked…
> Given 2 systems, one which exhibits several flaws often, and another which rarely exhibits flaws but is theoretically capable of exhibiting a certain offensive flaw, does it make sense to reject the better-behaving system because of a theoretical result? I think not No, but if we want to go on the basis of how likely it is to produce those outcomes, Instant-runoff voting beats approval voting by a long shot. Amarty…
This is off. Voting is not a system for selecting the best candidate. Voting, in whatever forms it exists, is a system to avoid violence and conflict. Each side feels it had a fair shot, regardless of outcome. The purpose of voting is to leave you with that feeling, to avoid unpleasant behavior from the losing party. The best person for the job almost never gets it. That's why we don't vote people in when hiring some…
Yes, and in addition it's also a system to ensure that elected officials and their parties have accountability. If you win an election and then "betray" your voters, you won't be reelected. If you can't be reelected, you could damage the chances of your party. In essence, democracy in its current form is not so much about choosing the right/best candidate. It's more about making sure the winner cannot become a despot…
That ain't accountability, that's a joke. If you pay me 5000$ to do a job, and I don't lift a finger, and your "punishment" is that we won't do that a second time, then I have free money and you're a fool. It doesn't hurt the party one bit either; that's the whole point of corporatism, you can swap out individuals while the "brand" rolls on, saying "whoops, bad apple" every 5 seconds, with people forgetting after 2.
"It's more about making sure the winner cannot become a despot."
Correction: it replaces a single despotic individual with a tag team of people who basically can do whatever they want - within boundaries, sure, they at least have to be somewhat slick about it, and know how to make a puppy face, too; but certainly not within boundaries defined by the actual will of the people who handed their power as souvereigns over to their representatives. Having despotic entities control you is not one iota better than despotic humans, not in the long run.
Despotism is marked by the control going only down, accountability going only up -- period. Not by angry men on podiums necessarily, and not by bloodshed. (Not that there isn't plenty bloodshed, but that's besides the point) If you seriously see a huge difference or improvement there, you've fallen for it I'm afraid.