10-15-2019, 07:03 PM
(10-15-2019, 04:44 PM)ijmorlan Wrote:(10-15-2019, 03:37 PM)tomh009 Wrote: Understood -- that's a deficiency of any voting system that uses a single-member constituency.
But STV (which is also a ranked ballot) would (could) result in a reasonably high degree of proportionality, as long as the electoral districts are not too small.
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.