If Britain were Germany
[Update: Apparently the German system is more complex than I realized–see comments below, especially regarding the SNP.]
The Conservatives won an impressive come from behind victory last night. I thought it would be interesting to compare the actual outcome, to the outcome that would have occurred with a German-style proportional representation system. In that system, seats are assigned in proportion to vote share, but only to parties getting at least 5% of the vote. I’ll show the number of seats under the German regime, with the actual number won in parentheses. The difference is stunning:
Conservative 273 (330)
Labour 226 (232)
UKIP 93 (1)
Liberal Dems 58 (8)
SNP 0 (56)
Others 0 (23)
I suppose the Tories could have cobbled together another coalition government, if the Lib Dems were keen on another suicide mission. But if they weren’t?
Europe has lots of right wing nationalist parties. While the UKIP is not as bad as some of the others, it is still a bit outside the mainstream. The reason the UK lacks a big populist party has nothing to do with the UK electorate, it’s all about the system.
PS. Of course the usual Lucas Critique caveats apply, especially where strategic voting occurs.
PPS. No surprises in today’s jobs report—more of the same.
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8. May 2015 at 06:31
Your analysis is incorrect. While Germany looks for overall proportionality, its actual ballot is split between a “first vote” for the riding and a “second vote” for the party.
Despite its low share of the overall vote, the SNP would retain all of the members it had directly elected. Additionally, parties that win a certain number of regional mandates are still eligible for proportional representation notwithstanding failing the 5% threshold.
Further affecting your results, the proportionality criterion and threshold is applied at the state, not national level. This allows Germany to still have regional parties such as the CSU in Bavaria, which is technically separate from the sister-party CDU in the rest of Germany.
Regardless, with your results the natural coalition would have been Tory/UKIP, with the latter agreeing to confidence and supply measures in return for restriction on immigration and a referendum on EU membership.
8. May 2015 at 06:31
First SS, congrats on that early call last night.
This is a very interesting polling company mea culpa post.
http://survation.com/snatching-defeat-from-the-jaws-of-victory/
Basically, polling company Survation ran a voter intention survey Weds May 6th and got results that very closely matched the election result. But they didn’t publish the results because it was “an outlier”, according to them. They now “regret” not publishing.
Your Quiet Tories made the difference.
8. May 2015 at 06:38
A correction to myself above: apparently the 5% threshold is indeed national, rather than at the state-level. However, the SNP would still be unaffected, as it would retain its direct mandates. Its weight would probably be reduced via overhang seats, however.
8. May 2015 at 06:49
Majromax is quite right about the constituency seats in Germany, I came to make the same comment. For an example, it’s how the seats in the Scottish Parliament are allocated– something that was designed to prevent the SNP from ever having a majority there, but which failed.
8. May 2015 at 06:50
The difference in Germany is that the smaller parties essentially never win constituency seats– though the general critique applies of how they’d campaign differently if that were the case, I suppose.
8. May 2015 at 07:11
This is another good example of Arrow’s impossibility theorem. Which of course supports your theory that there is no such thing as “public opinion”.
8. May 2015 at 07:58
The UK election results are for the Conservatives no reason to change the voting system.
8. May 2015 at 09:03
Even more complications;
http://www.capx.co/dont-be-so-fast-to-trash-britains-voting-system/
———quote——–
Is it “fair” that one nationalist party (UKIP), with nearly 3x the votes of another, ends up with a single seat against the smaller party’s [SNP] 56? There is a hidden premise in that question that the supporters of proportional representation never mention. They assume that the relevant unit of account in politics is not the person, but the party.
Parties matter a great deal in today’s Britain of course. But first-past-the-post allows voters to choose between people. Thus, Douglas Alexander can lose to 20-year-old Mhairi Black in Paisley and Renfrewshire South. You had better believe that in a PR system, the opposition party’s campaign chief would be high enough on a list somewhere to ensure his job security. Because proportional representation gives more power to party bosses at the expense of individual voters and individual candidates. So too with Mr. Carswell, the ex-Tory incumbent in Clacton, re-elected largely on his personal popularity and political skill. This is an intensely local sort of politics that party lists tend to scour away.
Consider again the case of Scotland. The SNP’s support north of the border is clearly intense, as well as being more demographically concentrated than UKIP’s more diffused backing. If we diluted the SNP’s support throughout the U.K. electorate, the nationalists would have ended up with about 30 seats instead of 56. UKIP’s share of the vote meanwhile would have netted the party 82 seats in Westminster. Under this straightforward translation of votes, the Tories would be on 240 this morning and Labour on 198. Would this be “better”? Would it more truly reflect the elusive will of the people? Only, once more, if you believe that what voters are choosing are parties, not people. There is a whiff of dehumanizing collectivism in that premise””just a whiff mind you, but I suspect that’s why conservatives tend to be more wary than the left of PR-type reforms.
———-endquote——–
And the Labour Party appears to be gerrymandered into a stronger position than they’d otherwise be.
8. May 2015 at 09:40
To be strictly correct, the difference between the system for the Scottish Parliament and the one for the German Bundestag is that the German system reserves extra “overhang” seats for the PR part so that the end result is always pretty proportional (for parties with at least 5%), whereas the Scottish system does not and thus if a party wins a lot of constituencies but does poorly in share overall (as the SNP), the end result will not be proportional.
8. May 2015 at 11:37
@Patrick:
> They assume that the relevant unit of account in politics is not the person, but the party.
This is why I am leaning towards STV as my preferred quasi-proportional system, since it is one of the very few that can function correctly in the absence of political party affiliations.
8. May 2015 at 13:50
All systems have flaws, nothing is as good as an educated population. But considering only the system, Brazil has a full proportional representation system, and … it does not work well. The primary reason is that representatives forget about what they told voters during the campaign, and set out to pursue their more immediate objectives, which are not necessarily aligned with the voters. Districts bring legitimacy to the table, something that is lost in the proportional system, at the cost of a somewhat not so perfect proportional representation.
8. May 2015 at 13:50
The Tories would be best off under such a scenario forming a minority government and doing deals with UKIP/the Lib Dems on an issue-by-issue basis, perhaps with some longer term budget deal with one of the parties.
The best news for the UK political system is that we’re going to keep onto the House of Lords, which has been a bastion of civil liberties and which is where politicians go to have intellectually serious debates. It’s one big flaw is that it offends certain dogmas that politicians pick up when doing ‘activism’.
8. May 2015 at 15:16
Robazzi—Yes–but with districts a loser of the national popular vote can end up winning. In 2000 Gore outpolled Bush but “lost” the US Presidential election. Regardless of one’s personal politics, that is not the right result.
8. May 2015 at 16:01
The Lucas critique applies to NGDPLT.
8. May 2015 at 17:48
@benjamin cole: “a loser of the national popular vote can end up winning. … Regardless of one’s personal politics, that is not the right result.”
If you honestly believe that the winner of the national popular vote should be elected the President, then it’s trivial to make a simple voting rule to that effect. But then the candidates would change their behavior, and spend all their time appealing to California and New York, and ignoring all the flyover states in the middle.
There was an existing election rule, it was not based on national popular vote, both campaigns knew this well, and resources were devoted on both sides in order to maximize their chances, given the rules they knew they were competing under. (Hence the specific and limited battleground states like Florida that received the vast bulk of both campaign’s efforts.)
It’s silly to look in hindsight at a completely different voting rule than everyone had explicitly agreed to, and use that as attempted criticism. Of course a different rule could result in a different outcome. And in different candidate behavior! Why is that an interesting observation?
8. May 2015 at 18:34
“If you honestly believe that the winner of the national popular vote should be elected the President, then it’s trivial to make a simple voting rule to that effect.”
Don, love you baby, but the whole point is that it is virtually impossible… the machine is built to F*CK any big state that wastes it’s energy trying to gain power by moving national. You pay more in taxes and get stymied by lesser players with 3 queens on the board.
8. May 2015 at 19:39
Party-slate elections create a lot of incentive problems with regards to corruption, special interests, and voter accountability.
The Electoral College was not intended to serve the will of a slim majority any more than the Bill of Rights. The Founders distrusted democracy.
8. May 2015 at 19:53
“a loser of the national popular vote can end up winning. … Regardless of one’s personal politics, that is not the right result.”
Upon reading the Federalist Papers and the Founders’ reasoning behind this system they created that creates this possibility, it seemed like a pretty good idea to me. Still does. Not because of any personal politics, but because of the nature of politics fundamentally, which they recognized.
Do you similarly object to the idea that the team that scores the most runs during the World Series can lose, and sometimes does?
8. May 2015 at 20:58
Sumner goes where angels fear to tread. He opines on Greek politics, UK surprise elections, and German voting schemes. And he’s an expert on the net environmental impact of beavers. Jack of all trades…
8. May 2015 at 22:24
All of which is why the Australian system is the best. Single member preferential voting in lower house: generally delivers clear government. Proportional representation in the upper house: forces negotiation with the actual range of opinion.
Though I would prefer the upper house to be Hare-Clarke with Robson Rotation rather than the current arrangement.
8. May 2015 at 23:51
Lorenzo
You guys have all the luck: a sensible electoral system, flexible Inflation Targeting, huge natural resources per capita and sunshine. Cause and effect?
I voted for district pref voting in the UK referendum on it in 2012 but the two big parties were against it, so it fell. Hopefully, Labour are now regretting their opposition. With full PR and party lists we’d still have Ed Balls in Parliament!
9. May 2015 at 06:39
Thanks Majromax,
Otto, Interesting. If they did not publish, they deserve no credit.
Ben, I agree about the 2000 election. The Electoral College makes no sense.
9. May 2015 at 08:33
Actually, Scott, the Electoral College makes a good deal of sense. For the reasons Tall Dave and Jim Glass mention. It’s just one of many ways that the Constitution was set up to thwart the political aspirations of ‘factions’.
It worked particularly beneficially in 2000 in Florida. If we hadn’t had it then, then there would have been fifty state challenges to vote counting. We’d have had something like the 2008 gubernatorial election in Washington state, where the ‘winner’ almost surely didn’t garner the most legal votes, but she did have the cleverest lawyers.
9. May 2015 at 09:24
@Don Geddis “then it’s trivial to make a simple voting rule to that effect” (wrt US presidential elections)
Hardly a trivial matter – it would require a Constitutional amendment, and those are quite difficult to pass. Appropriately and deliberately.
9. May 2015 at 13:12
The Electoral College makes no sense.
Purging extremism by driving electoral outcomes to depend on winning in the center, instead of upon whipping up the largest most-rabid majorities on the outside wings, makes no sense?
The USA has the longest-running constitutional regime in the world (some would argue for the British but the functioning of their unwritten constitution has changed a lot more than that of ours has during the period of co-existence) and unquestionably the most successful as well, as per large scale political-economic outcome.
Yet it gets no more respect than Rodney Dangerfield from the Americans who benefit from it.
Nope, time and again we read how “American democracy is doomed”…
http://www.vox.com/2015/3/2/8120063/american-democracy-doomed
… and how, hey, what we really need instead is a parliamentary/popular vote system that will elect the most populist leaders (Hitler, Mussolini, Chavez … just *once* in a constitutional regime will do it!) and resolve gridlock too (Italian governments with an average existence measured in months before collapsing, over a period of decades, and how’s Greece been doing?) That’s the cure!
With the US constitutional system the parties to win the presidency must fight to win among a relatively small population in a dead-center state like Ohio. They must be calculatedly moderate to win the marginal vote in the center without scaring away an offsetting one.
With a popular vote election they’d instead fight to whip up the largest numbers of votes among their interest groups — with the most extreme, who are the most likely to vote, getting the most attention in the form of firebrand rhetoric to inflame them and especially the voters on the margin of the extremes into becoming more extreme and more motivated to vote and support the parties. The left would be whipping up the cities and the right whipping up the countryside for biggest numbers. One wants to really see polarization, and race politics?
With the rules of the game different the game would be played entirely differently. People typically imagine that with the electoral college replaced by ‘most votes wins’ we’d have elections just like we have now, except with the nice improvement that the candidate who gets the most votes would always win. But the election dynamics would be hugely different.
In 1932, during our worst crisis of the last 150 years, our system produced FDR. A popular vote system would have been far more likely to have produced someone much further in the direction of a Huey Long or anti-Huey Long. Consider what popular vote/parliamentary systems actually did produce across Europe at the time.
The nature of the US system is not an accident. The Founders across the full width of the political spectrum of the day, Federalists and Jeffersonians alike, felt fear and loathing of populist factions. They saw populist factions as the #1 danger to constructive, healthy government institutions. Look at all the other constitutional regimes the USA’s has outlasted over the last two centuries — were they wrong?
Any electoral system can be plausibly criticized (Arrow). But to say that a system designed with the explicit purpose of putting a damper on populist extremism, and which actually succeeds in doing so, “makes no sense”, well … I disagree.
9. May 2015 at 16:12
@Jim Glass: It’s possible to make a more narrow criticism of the Electoral College. The original intent was that the average voters wouldn’t fully understand the candidates or issues, so they created an indirect system, where the local voter would elect their wisest local representative, who would then investigate the issues and place the actual votes for President.
That indirect voting system isn’t of much value, and of course today candidates appeal directly to the citizen voters, and Electoral College “voters” pre-commit (but not in a legal sense!) to which candidate they will vote for, if they are “elected” to the college.
This is a separate issue, from whether the final voting for President should be decided by pure popular voting (leading to the extremism baiting that you covered so well), or proportional voting by states, or the current system of winner-take-all voting by states.
In theory, you could still have a winner-take-all state-by-state voting system, but directly from the citizens voting, without the cumbersome addition of the “Electoral College”.
But I don’t know if that’s what Sumner was referring to.
9. May 2015 at 16:18
@Bronwyn Máiréad: “Hardly a trivial matter – it would require a Constitutional amendment, and those are quite difficult to pass.” Yes, of course, but I think you missed the point. I don’t think the US should change to a pure popular vote, because I think it would make governance worse. So I myself would be part of that political opposition.
But I was responding to the claim: “a loser of the national popular vote can end up winning. … Regardless of one’s personal politics, that is not the right result.“, which suggested that somehow we all know what the “right result” ought to be, and unfortunately due to some kind of mistake or oversight, we ended up with an election system that isn’t always “right”.
My point was, that “election by pure popular vote” is a trivially easy system to design. It was considered, and thoughtfully rejected. The US’s current voting system allows losers of the popular vote to (sometimes) win the overall election — on purpose. My point was that the divergence was deliberate, not accidental.
If everyone truly agreed that “winner of the popular vote” should indeed win the election, it would have been an easy matter to design an election system with that outcome. There is nothing surprising or confusing or complex about implementing such a voting rule. It’s just a bad idea, that’s all.
9. May 2015 at 20:01
No surprises in the jobs report ??????
Wall Street certainly did not like the jobs report. To see that one has to look at the bond market, NOT the stock market.
9. May 2015 at 22:58
I have made this point before, but it’s worth making again. Is there any empirical evidence that a particular electoral systems is better for economic growth or freedom? I can’t see one. Unless you can definitively show that a country is being held back by its electoral system then the Burkean approach is surely correct – just leave it alone. A country’s electoral system is intertwined with its culture and you never know what unintended consequences will result from a clumsy but well intentioned change.
10. May 2015 at 06:47
Patrick, The vote in Florida was something like 75 votes apart. Nationwide it was closer to a half million. There would have been no dispute if we went with the popular vote.
The 2000 vote count was a needless fiasco.
Don, You said:
“The nature of the US system is not an accident.”
Yes, but it was built for an America that no longer exists, and hasn’t since the Civil War.
10. May 2015 at 10:57
@ChrisA: “Is there any empirical evidence that a particular electoral systems is better for economic growth or freedom?”
I don’t have empirical evidence for you, but I can offer some intriguing theoretical evidence. David Deutsch in The Beginning of Infinity (which is mostly about other topics), has a chapter comparing different political systems. His thesis is that proportional representation forces either gridlock, or at best a ready excuse for failure: “we had these great ideas, but the other side wouldn’t let us implement them fully”. (Coalition governments require negotiation to even decide on the goals of the ruling politicians, much less any actual implementation.) That allows the voting public to retain their biases over the long term, because they’re never forced to confront the actual real-world effect of their idealistic dreams.
Deutsch recommends a winner-take-all system like the US Presidential election. Not because it best reflects the desires of the current voters. But because it allows for much clearer tests of political theory. It doesn’t matter whether you agree with or oppose candidate A wanting to implement wacky political theory Z. What’s important is that all the voters can agree that candidate A won this time, and has sufficient power to actually implement theory Z, and thus we can all watch and see what happens. And possibly learn something.
In other words, the suggestion is that you design a political system, not to best mirror the wishes of the current voters, but instead to allow the nation to best learn and improve over time. What matters is being able to run the clearest long-term (political) experiments, not in making the current voters the most satisfied.
10. May 2015 at 11:11
@ssumner: So you’re in favor of a national popular vote for US President? Let’s forget the original history (which was a political compromise for the 13 original colonies). Let’s forget the “indirect” nature of the Electoral College, which isn’t relevant or useful in modern elections. The real political question is: should elections be decided by winner-take-all state allocations, or by popular vote? Each choice has tradeoffs. Right now, California is ignored by all candidates, despite having a huge number of electoral college votes, and a huge population, because no feasible amount of candidate effort will change the voting outcome. But in a pure popular election, the concerns of many small states will be completely ignored instead. Are you sure that a popular vote would lead to better outcomes?
If you’re just wondering about the political feasibility of making a change, it’s true that there’s a Nash equilibrium here, and no winner-take-all state can improve its own position by unilaterally moving to proportional or popular vote electors. But I think these guys have a pretty good strategy: they ask states to pass bills with conditional language. The bills have no effect at all, until enough states agree to the conditional language to pass the 270 electors threshold, in which case the group can force the entire Presidential election to instantly switch to a popular vote election.
Do you support that effort?
10. May 2015 at 13:36
Patrick, The vote in Florida was something like 75 votes apart. Nationwide it was closer to a half million. There would have been no dispute if we went with the popular vote.
The decision might have been by 3 million by popular vote. Different rules, entirely different election. Much more populist. If that’s what you really want.
Again, one can’t credibly imagine that it would have been the same election only “improved”.
The 2000 vote count was a needless fiasco.
Totally true. US firms account for millions of financial transactions per day, near instantaneously, with a 0.000…% error rate.
State and local boards of elections, OTOH, print unreadable paper ‘hanging chad’ ballots they can’t tally correctly after counting three times over — because they are near universally patronage mills for local political hacks.
Thus this type of election counting fiasco is replayed scores of times in every election year across the nation, at all levels. In this case it just happened to affect a national contest.
There’d have been no ongoing fiasco at all if there had been a clear, certain count vote result immediately, no matter how slight difference. Done on election day. Finis. The fiasco resulted entirely from the suing and arguing and political challenging re the ‘disputed’ vote numbers.
The fact that the states continue to run such inept election vote counting operations, compared to even their own electronic tax receipt counting operations, was the cause of this fiasco and so many others like it at all levels. You can say that reveals their true preferences, and you can blame it on politics — but you can’t fairly blame it on the election rules.
Don, You said:
“The nature of the US system is not an accident.”
I wrote that. Me! Me! Over here!!
Yes, but it was built for an America that no longer exists, and hasn’t since the Civil War.
What in the Founders concerns doesn’t still exist? The dangers of populist politics disappeared after the Civil War?
You can have a popular vote election system driven to populist outside candidates and issues, or a by-state election system driven to seeking the marginal vote in the reasonable center re center issues.
The Founders feared and loathed populist factions and chose the later, a political design “fair and stable” over one “fair and unstable”. I’m with them.
Now the electoral college itself, as a wise college of electors, was obsolete in 1800. It is irrelevant to everything.
11. May 2015 at 05:59
Don, You said:
“The real political question is: should elections be decided by winner-take-all state allocations, or by popular vote?”
Given that Maine and Nebraska don’t follow winner-take-all, I’ve always been dubious of the claim that the constitution requires winner-take-all.
The bill you mention sounds promising, but I haven’t looked at it in detail.
I don’t agree that small states would be ignored, voters in all states would be addressed in proportion to their population, as it should be. If one state has 10 times as many people, it should get 10 times as much advertising spending, which would be roughly the same number of commercials.
Jim, Majority vote is the most straightforward system under democracy. The burden of proof is on those who prefer something else. I don’t see ANY good arguments for something else, other than “we’ve always done it that way.”
11. May 2015 at 06:23
@Jim Glass, excellent work. Money excerpt:
“In 1932, during our worst crisis of the last 150 years, our system produced FDR. A popular vote system would have been far more likely to have produced someone much further in the direction of a Huey Long or anti-Huey Long. Consider what popular vote/parliamentary systems actually did produce across Europe at the time.”
11. May 2015 at 10:19
@ssumner: “I’ve always been dubious of the claim that the constitution requires winner-take-all.”
I haven’t heard that claim, but you’re right, it’s almost certainly false. My own link reports: “The U.S. Constitution (Article II, Section 1) gives the states exclusive control over awarding their electoral votes: “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors…” The winner-take-all rule was used by only three states in 1789.”
Winner-take-all is a Nash equilibrium / prisoner’s dilemma type of problem. When all states start out with proportional voting, then the few that change to winner-take-all suddenly receive greater attention from the candidates. And then all states are eventually winner-take-all, and the country is worse off than it was before. But no state has the incentive to change back by itself.
11. May 2015 at 15:18
@ Brian Donohue
Thank you, kind sir.
11. May 2015 at 15:26
Jim, Majority vote is the most straightforward system under democracy.
Sure. As the gold standard is the most straightforward of money systems. Simple, lots of experience with it, everybody can grasp the idea and the benefits it promises easily — most straightforward of all by far. All great virtues, surely. Who could argue?
The burden of proof is on those who prefer something else.
Sure, just like with the gold standard.
I don’t see ANY good arguments for something else, other than “we’ve always done it that way.”
Oh, now, you know that I esteem you greatly and am a friend … so I’ll restrain my old usenet slash-and-burn Mr Hyde persona that is trying to bust out at this moment (Patrick Sullivan remembers it – though it doesn’t match his!) and merely deduce that you haven’t ever looked for such arguments with an active interest and an open mind, because they exist by the volume, literally.
Different electoral systems incentivize different electoral behaviors and results just as different economic systems incentivize different economic behaviors and results.
Some electoral systems foster a polity under stress to elect outside populists, Mussolini/Hitler/Chavez/Long etc, others push it to elect from the center, like FDR/Lincoln. Electing a Lincoln may not solve a crisis — but Lincoln was no firebrand who fueled a civil war, he did everything possible to avoid it.
The very fact that in the worst two crises this country ever faced our electoral process produced winners no more radical, with no more intention to personally exploit the crisis, than Lincoln and FDR, systematically — look at the other leading candidates in the same elections, nobody populist-radical got even close, they were all purged early — says something important. Compare other regimes, then give a little respect.
I am no worshiper of the olden days. Everything was worse in the old days in all dimensions, to a first order, and worse yet the further back one goes. But one area where the intellectuals of yore were really smarter, more educated and better informed than ours was in how politics worked — because their very lives depended on it, quite literally, and that’s a heck of an incentive.
The Founders, for all their differences, had a group mastery of a strong literature on the nature of republican government structures and democracies backed by mounds of data going back through the medieval republics to the early Greeks. E.g., here’s a very excellent (IMHO) audio ‘great course’ on Machiavelli’s Discourses (not the The Prince, which was a cartoon-like job application yet is the only thing of M’s anyone knows of now because it’s so short and catchy) covering republics back from his Italy to Rome and before. It’s the start of modern political science and the concepts in it influenced the Founders significantly. And in our everyone-is-safe political world it is entirely forgotten. Anyhow, recommended by me.
But enough pedantry. Two possible electoral systems: In (A) the result is “barbell” voting with each party seeking to whip up the “pure” largest gross number of votes to win, most efficiently by picking opposing classes/regions to inflame with populist rhetoric. (Think 1858-60). The other (B) is “district majority count” voting, with the parties seeking to win the median voter in the median district, with populist rhetoric scaring away that median voter. (Think 2000s Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc.)
Which to choose, A or B? Both are entirely fair in that each party has an equal chance to win from the starting line, and each is entirely straightforward in its own way.
It really just depends on how one feels about encouraging populist results.
“Straightforward” is no virtue as a replacement for thinking things through to their differing consequences — as with the gold standard, so with electoral systems.
And c’mon … if one really wants “straightforward” populist majority vote rules, then the Senate is a perverse mutation, kill it. And how the heck do unelected judges strike down voted-upon laws? And the Bill of Rights’ very purpose is to defeat straightforward majority vote decisions.
The explanation is that the USA is not a democracy, it is a republic — a *highly* non-trivial difference, though most everybody today seems to have forgotten it and use the two words as if somehow they were the same — because a republic is explicitly structured to limit and channel the influence of popular voting. Intentionally, it is no mistake. Thus, saying “the most straightforward voting method for a democracy” and applying it to the USA is a non-sequitur.
11. May 2015 at 17:31
@Jim Glass: “the Bill of Rights’ very purpose is to defeat straightforward majority vote decisions”
I’ve often thought those particular restrictions on government power, were the very most important part of the US Constitution. “Majority rules” suffers from the tyranny of the majority problem, which is subtle and difficult to fix.
12. May 2015 at 06:05
Brian, FDR won the popular vote by a landslide.
The only election of the past 100 years that would have changed due to a popular vote system is 2000, and in retrospect the country would have been better off if Gore had won. So it’s not a radical change. Yes, with differnet campaigning styles a few more might have flipped, but I doubt it.
Jim, You lost me somewhere, because the “we’ve always done it that way/traditionalist approach” is sort of like the gold standard. But I’m opposed to the gold standard. The straightforward system is target what you want to stabilize (NGDP.)
If the US is a republic, then I’d rather have a Swiss-style democracy.
12. May 2015 at 08:11
Jose Romeu Robazzi,
Great points, thanks for sharing. Party-slate elections do not hold voters accountable for their votes, or politicians for their policies. If you can’t call someone “your representative” then the relationship is exceedingly attenuated.
12. May 2015 at 12:37
@TallDave
Yes, this has been a major issue here in Brazil. Fortunately, since the incumbent government is very weak and has lost control over the reforms agenda, the Brazilian upper house has passed a bill creating districts in cities above 200k in population. And both houses of Congres are considering scrapping re-election institution alltoghether, for President and State Governors… 8 years of bad, populist government is too much.
1. June 2015 at 02:39
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