10-15-2019, 10:28 PM
(10-15-2019, 07:03 PM)danbrotherston Wrote:(10-15-2019, 04:44 PM)ijmorlan Wrote: I think advocates of PR often take as given what they are advocating. Why should the Commons have representatives proportionate to the party popular vote?
I agree it shouldn’t be wildly dis-proportionate, but to use proportionality itself as the yardstick against which appropriateness of representation is measured is circular reasoning.
Here is an alternative proposal (I don’t specifically support this over every other proposal, but I think it’s interesting), which I challenge any PR advocate to refute: give each party a number of MPs proportional to the square root of their popular vote. I understand that this tends to match power more closely to vote share. In particular, in the event that one party gets a majority of vote share, they get lots of power but not all the power.
I think it’s more important for new parties and even independents to be able to attract supporters than for the MP counts to exactly match the vote counts.
I really don't understand your comment here. I am not saying there aren't other considerations, but proportionality is fundamentally the point of government...being less proportional is bad...yes, we may be able to tolerate some as a trade off for other considerations, but I don't understand how one must justify the idea that government should be of the people.
No, the point of democratic government is to represent the interests of the people. PR takes as a goal that the number of representatives from each party will be (near) proportional to the number of votes that party got in the election. Already, there are two assumptions:
1) there should be these things called “parties” for which one votes; and
2) the best way to represent the interests of the people is for the number of MPs from each party in the legislature should be proportional to the number of votes received by the corresponding party.
As I said, I agree that a situation where a party with 33% of the vote gets 55% of the MPs and therefore 100% of the power (well, not quite, MPs aren’t that well trained, but not far off), is clearly problematic, but I’m not aware of anybody actually arguing for the proposition that if a party gets 33% of the vote it should have 33% of the MPs +/- 1 MP. What’s wrong with 30% or 35%? I notice that you didn’t say anything about my ”square root” idea (which is not mine but arises out of a consideration of the voting power of various parties or interest groups given various numbers of representatives in the assembly). At a minimum, an advocate for PR should be able to explain, without resorting to circular argumentation, why simple proportion is more appropriate than the square root.
Also, does it matter where the support is? I think there is a colorable argument to be made that thin support country wide is not worthy of representation in Parliament; but if a large fraction of people in a small part of the country have concerns, they probably need to be heard, because widespread dissatisfaction in a geographical area is bad for the union.