I'm not sure if I've made a post regarding proportional vs pluralistic voting systems, but although I missed the MPR radio program, here we have this article:
"Broadcast: Midday, 10/12/2009, 11:00 a.m.
MIDDAY offers a primer on what's also called Ranked Choice Voting, which will be used in the Minneapolis general election in November. St. Paul voters will decide if they want to employ IRV in future elections.
Let me also reference pluralistic and proportional voting, specifically Duverger's Law 2,3,:"In political science, Duverger's law is a principle which asserts that a plurality rule election system tends to favor a two-party system. This is one of two hypotheses proposed by Duverger, the second stating that “The double ballot majority system and proportional representation tend to multipartism”"
Argument: Minneapolis and Minnesota are politically more evolved than most of the rest of the country.
1) How Will Instant Runoff Voting Work? MPR Midday Program hosted by Gary Eichten
Accessed October 12, 2009.
2) Proportional Representation, Wikipedia.
3) Duverger's Law, Wikipedia.
Posts
Yes, I actually came across this website on Friday. www.fairvotemn.org. Here is their mission statement.
ReplyDeleteOur Mission
FairVote Minnesota works for better democracy through through public education and advocacy. Our focus is on progressive voting systems that lead to greater competitiveness, better representation and more participation in elections.
We advocate for voting systems with a demonstrated record of success in producing these qualities such as Ranked Choice Voting for single-winner and multiple-winner elections.
I think they are advocating for an IRV system. I think we know the advantages of such a system, let's briefly identify any negatives to IRV.
1) One party becomes very popular, rest of population is so divided never get major party out of office (see Russia).
2)?
PR is the dominant system of electing governments in the world today. So I guess that most of the world's democracies more politically evolved than the US?
ReplyDeleteWhat MN really should do is elect one house of the state legislature by party-list(with an open list) PR.
There is no utility in having two mirror-image houses. Since no one seems interested in switching to unicameral-except for a maroon like Jesse Ventura-representative democracy is best served by electing one house via the traditional Anglo-American first-past-the-post single-member district system and the other by using statewide PR-Israel and the Netherlands elect their national parliaments by the latter method.
This would allow for various ideological and other minorities that do not get represented under the FPTP system to get a voice in the legislature.It would also do more than any single reform to break up the two-party duopoly.
An open list would be preferable to a closed list because Americans like to vote for a specific individual.
Disadvantages of IRV:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOwDyGCaOFM&feature=player_embedded
Try again:
ReplyDeletehttp://instantrunoff.blogspot.com/2009/09/instant-runoff-voting-makes-every-vote.html
Very good. I was not making the distinction between IRV and proportional representation.
ReplyDeleteThe governments we instituted (or rather had a hand in instituting) after ww2 use proportional represenation I believe.
So the problem is our founding fathers did not have the knowledge offered by political science (mostly in the last 60 years) and we're left with a stale system of democratic representation. How does the United States update itself without having a civil war or being conquered by another country? I suppose it has to run experiments like IRV and the like in the states before they can be adopted on a national level. Mainstream media would probably view this as a trend toward socialism and so we'll be lucky if we end up with what most of the rest of the democracies of the world already have before we are dead.
I'd like to add that voting is only one of several problems we've identified.