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r/EndFPTP•
jpfed

What are the disadvantages of weighted legislatures?

I haven't seen this discussed much at all, and I don't know if it's been tried anywhere. Here's the idea:

  1. For simplicity, let's just use mark-one ballots*.
  2. Each district is allowed to seat more than one legislator.
  3. Every legislator getting, say, 10% or more of their district's vote is seated.
  4. The number of votes that legislator received is their "weight" in the legislature- when the legislature takes up votes, each legislator's vote is weighted by how many votes they received in the election.

The advantages of this method are clear to me; this system should dramatically reduce wasted votes AND keep legislators accountable to a particular constituency in a way that most proportional systems don't. It's similar to liquid or delegative democracy, but simpler than they are, because you don't have to allow multiple levels of delegation or changing your delegate on-demand.

*Mark-one ballots aren't a requirement here; they're just easy. I may be wrong, but I think that the overall system won't be that sensitive to the particulars of generating candidate weights from ballots. If I am wrong and seemingly-okay ways of going from ballots to weights are bad, of course I'd love to hear about that.

So- what are the disadvantages?

Posted Nov 6, 2018, 3:10 AM UTC

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Daughie8•

I've also thought about a system like this, so I'm curious as well.

A few points:

  • The way you describe it you'll get a variable amount of legislators each election, this may not matter, but it may be beneficial to have a fixed number of legislators. This can be fixed by instead of setting a vote threshold you give each district a set amount of legislators, those who receive the most votes are elected, although this may bring its own problems.
  • With a (fixed) threshold you're likely to end up with sympathy votes (A¹: 45% votes, A²: 9% votes, B: 46%, some A¹-voters are likely to vote for A² to help him/her above the threshold).
  • One might argue that legislators should be considered equal, and this method defeats this. I'm not convinced this is a good argument myself, though (but I've heard it when discussing leveling seats).
  • Some nations gives low population districts more legislators (for example, European Parliament use a degressive proportionality which gives low population countries more legislators). If you want to increase the influence from such districts you'll likely need another weight, strengthening legislator from these districts.
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jpfedOP•

Good points. As far as fixing the number of seats per district, I think there are advantages to four:

  1. It's not so high that you expect lots of crazy fringe candidates

  2. It's not so low that you expect many wasted votes

  3. If you expect most variation in candidates to be captured in two dimensions (like you see in models like DW-NOMINATE and the Political Compass) then you could get representatives for all four quadrants of that plane.

I am not too concerned with legislators being equal to one another. The constituents are equal to one another, and methods that prevent wasted votes help guarantee that.

Re degressive proportionality, I think that the system can accommodate something like that very flexibly by adjusting legislator weights. But I would prefer not to. The point of this system is to provide a transparent reflection of the will of the populace by introducing as few nonlinearities as possible. If small districts get up-weighted (e.g. by applying some concave function to the weights) then this adds another avenue for manipulating district maps to gain advantage. But if weights are directly proportional to votes, then manipulating district maps is harder and provides less benefit.

In fact, with this system, districts do not even have to be equal in population. You could have districts entirely built out of existing boundaries (e.g. city limits, county boundaries, etc.).

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Skyval•

I'm interested in the idea as well.

As a modification, instead of having a threshold and variable number of reps, voting could be done using Asset Voting. Candidates trade points until there are a specified number remaining. They win, and their weights are equal to their points.

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jpfedOP•

Great link! I am not so concerned by the prospect of tons of candidates. In the current system, many candidates don't run because they don't think they'll have a high enough chance of winning. In the "meet-a-low-threshold-to-win" weighted system, candidates don't have as daunting a bar to clear- but they still need to estimate how popular they really think they'll be, because that's what will determine their power in the legislature (and so, whether running is really worth it).

EDIT: Okay, I think this link has convinced me that asset voting is superior to the OP method.

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BothBawlz•

Probably that it makes votes more complicated. You'd have to list down the legislatures and add up their vote tallies. If it's very close, people may feel that the original votes counts weren't accurate, and demand recounts.

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jpfedOP•

It's true that the votes each legislator received would have to be tracked and used when the legislature voted on anything. I've written software to help a state legislature manage its sessions; as long as the legislature is computer-assisted, the weights wouldn't add an appreciable amount of complexity. But it's true that if a legislature does not use computers, this would be a burdensome system.

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BothBawlz•

There are possibly other issues as well, though they're more vague. That's probably the big one. Which explains why it hasn't been implemented before. Inequality between members would also probably cause friction. But it's hard to know. I'd love to see it implemented to observe how it does in practice.

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