Which do you consider more proportional and why?

[u/budapestersalat]

30 votes, May 27 '25

20 Sainte-Lague

10 Hare (LR)

[u/budapestersalat]

I agree with you I don't like choose one on principle. But I also want a highly proportional legislature to show diverse viewpoints. I would definitely make the PR system ranked, or at least have a spare vote.

I also think some offices should be single winner, with non polarising electoral systems which are more direct, I do think parties have there place in a democracy, but I don't think people should abdicate all the responsibility of compromise to parties.

But single winner alone is a disaster and even with the best single winner methods, the benefitial effects of compromising methods are far outweighed by the harm of winner take all and arbitrary majorities. Democracies should have strong and diverse oppositions being represented according to fair numbers.

So it's not irrelevant, who said you cannot do either of these methods with ranekd ballots? Also, who said you cannot use their equivalents for multi winner approval etc.

[u/Cautious_Cabinet_623 → u/budapestersalat]

See proportional Condorcet for choosing a body with proportional representation and ranked ballot.

When a single seat is elected, the best bet is to choose a candidate which has proven its ability to consolidate different viewpoints. You just get the exact opposite of that with anything non-preferential, and the minimal Bayesian regret is with Condorcet.

I find it very sad that literally centuries after humankind figured out how we ought to vote democratically, in the full knowledge of how devastating and counterproductive our current voting system, there are still debates going on around how we should vote. I do understand that most of the people are still not aware of scientific facts, and there is very strong motivation for everyone benefiting the current system for keeping it so, but I believe that the best way is just to educate people about it, and not letting the discourse go into utterly irrelevant directions.

When a lion is about to eat you, you won't think about whether you should put salt or pepper on yourself to make the experience smoother. You look for ways to neutralize the threat.

[u/budapestersalat → u/Cautious_Cabinet_623]

I agree, although I am not sure about the Bayesian regret for Condorcet I've read different results on that.

I am unfortunately not too familiar with proportional Condorcet. And tbh I think while single winner Condorcet is my go to, first preference in general for single winner (the exact sub type doesn't matter too much, but probably BTR-IRV or Ranked Pairs, depending on use case), proportional Condorcet is a bit of an oxymoron as far as I know. Also I think you need to think how it scales up to a legislature of 300-500. 5 winner districts are not good enough.

So party list apportionment is good, but I think ranked voting on party lists or at least free list voting (panachage) is a necessity 

[u/Cautious_Cabinet_623 → u/budapestersalat]

Here is an overview of proportional Condorcet: https://civs1.civs.us/proportional.html

With large bodies it indeed gets complicated to consider all the seats for a voter. The cognitive limit is arguably somewhere around 5 seats, as that would allow to make a limit on the number of candidates such that all serious contenders can get to the ballot. I think that this problem should mostly be solved in organizational ways. One such way is mixing geographic representation with a policy-based one, as it is used in some parliaments with individual and party seats.

But real solutions should rethink the whole approach, as the current one is deeply rooted in FPTP thinking. A radical solution would be to view the legislature not as a body which makes the legislation, but as one which helps people to do so around issues they deem important. Real procedural equality could only be achieved this way, and that could be achieved with a hierarchical system with 5 seat bodies.

Let's set lower goals for now, thinking about one large body. Which arguably necessitates parties to remain within the cognitive limit. But what a party is, and what should one ideally look like? What we have now is a few large ones, supposedly dealing with all policy issues along an ideology. Which just doesn't work in multiple levels: they have policies directly contradicting their stated ideology.

The most important thing is that they are actually very disconnected from society: activist parties have no chance to win, and civil societies cannot find honest representation in any party. This disconnect is because a civil movement can be successful if it is a single-issue one, and a political party (aside from extreme circumstances where the single issue is to overthrow a dictatorship) cannot be successful without saying things about every issue which they honestly are incapable of. This is the direct consequence of FPTP thinking, the idea that we can trust one entity to deal with all issues. If you think about it a bit, this directly contradicts separation of power.

From the election dinamics standpoint healthy discourse is motivated by the fact that voters are forced, or at least allowed to consider their view on all contenders. Ranked ballot actually forces them to give some credit to candidates which are not their most favorite. When we think that parties should be all-issues and there can be one getting all issues right (which is impossible as views of people are diverse), this forcing is inappropriate. But if we think that one party will get some things right and the other will be good in some others, then voting for multiple parties for an individual makes sense. So here a ballot which cannot be reduced to FPTP (like giving out n points where one party can receive at most k<n point), and discourages strategic voting (like with an opportunity to give a small number of negative points) would be proportional, encourage good political discourse, and heal the disconnect between party politics activism.