tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7696446405100112491.post7789639897653151897..comments2023-10-31T06:45:58.112-08:00Comments on The Least of All Evils: Minneapolis ResultsDale Sheldon-Hesshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07974707193305445403noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7696446405100112491.post-14200567826385874862013-12-27T13:41:25.051-09:002013-12-27T13:41:25.051-09:00Firstly, my apologies for not wishing you a season...Firstly, my apologies for not wishing you a seasons greetings Dale! I am well and optimistic that the GOP civil war will enable electoral reform as key funders of the GOP won't like how our winner-take-all electoral system unduly punishes the center-right party for its loss in support. <br /><br />Secondly, in my experience, the real issue between me and most electoral-advocates of AV/RV or Condorcet-like election rules is whether it is critical to move the US towards a multi-party system or to make out 2-party dominated system not tilt to effective single-party rule or be so easy to game, as with the Cultural Wars wedge issues that have been successfully deployed by the GOP in their "Nixonian Southern Strategy" until recently. IRV permits a proliferation of small non-competitive candidates who can bring up new issues or reframe prevailing issues. This is sufficient to ensure that wedge issues will likely get reframed and not continue to persist in crowding out more important issues. <br /><br />Thus, I have no problems supporting FairVote in pushing for IRV(or a top 4 primary that uses IRV in stage 2) + American forms of PR, perhaps along with experimentation with multi-stage elections for our most important elections. I expect the weaker major party to take the lead in electoral reform and never to push for reform that might enables a multi-party system. But smaller third parties can still make a diff and I expect LTPs to proliferate and push for the use of low-grade PR to make "more local" elections that are o.w. chronically non-competitive to become competitive.<br /><br />dlwDLWhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17709279441985086959noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7696446405100112491.post-15031097857063311872013-12-27T12:57:26.959-09:002013-12-27T12:57:26.959-09:001. The establishment favorite didn't get an en...1. The establishment favorite didn't get an endorsement, or the win, because folks were okay with a proliferation of candidates due to the use of IRV. <br />2. You're really pushing it to make a big deal of an essential 49% victory. The loss-function here isn't all or nothing. And rhetorical over-simplifications are critical for pushing electoral reform to low-info voters. <br />3. Spoiler rates are spoiled as a good arg when there's a fix. <br /><br />But furthermore, BR's usefulness, your key arg in favor of AV/RV, isn't well accepted. A search on Google Scholar of "Bayesian Regret" with electoral gives only 16 returns and most are from Smith. http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22bayesian+regret%22+electoral&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C24&as_sdtp= Smith isn't a political scientist. He's a mathematician and if his views haven't caught on more broadly among political scientists, there's probably a better reason than that they aren't as good at math...<br /><br />Here are some reasons for skepticism: how much it leans on the cardinality of utility assumption, how it's sensitive to the non-trivial assumption that all of the candidates have equal a priori odds of being competitive. It doesn't matter what the dist'n assumptions for voter utilities are in an electoral simulation so much as the fact that the voter-utilities for all of the 7 candidates are drawn from the same dist'n. In real life, there's more typically a mixed distribution with fewer expected competitive candidates. And when you lower the number of expected competitive candidates, the diffs across electoral rules decline and the expediency with which they can be adopted proves to be more important. So I think the evidence suggests letting pragmatic considerations determine the focus for single-winner reform and focusing more on multi-winner reform.DLWhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17709279441985086959noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7696446405100112491.post-66027675312188886512013-11-30T23:04:08.515-09:002013-11-30T23:04:08.515-09:00And special thanks to Terry for the canvasing boar...And special thanks to Terry for the canvasing board link!Dalehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12958348490440095409noreply@blogger.com