Forum Council

@mosbrooker Mike, this forum is for structured discussions on voting theory, not personal blog posts. If you want to share your personal thoughts in a blog format, you’re welcome to start your own blog elsewhere.

@matija yeah, it seems that there were many factors that converged. I guess we never know what might have been or might be especially instrumental per se in the rise of anti-democratic regimes. As we’re seeing now in the USA, even supposedly “stable” vote-for-one systems are vulnerable to the most basic kind of fragmentation, namely splitting in half.

I’m not sure how stable these systems are then, considering the bipolar oscillations of government. The same gridlocks that make legislature impotent appear in a more blatant form. To me, that means vote-for-one is even less desirable than previously imagined, since even its claim to purported stability is moot.

I discussed something similar here and there's a video here as well. There's a video as well which shows a potential ballot design.

In what I discussed the top voted candidate in each district was automatically elected in the first phase.

@matija Do you need the first step about the electing the candidate with most votes in each district but only if they have a Hare quota? You could just do the whole process using the PR system. Or just elect the candidate with most votes anyway and just use the PR system for the second ones to be elected.

I tend to think quotas are somewhat arbitrary.

@matija True. If individual ballot data can be used, then the funding that results from each could be split equally across the candidates approved on that ballot. But this still might not be very satisfactory.

@matija If public funding is proportional to votes, then I'd say it's easier with approval voting than ranks. With ranks, you could use top votes as you say, but then you might give less funding to the election winner (by IRV, Condorcet or whatever).

@cfrank I've seen a few as well which I've deleted, but they're not overwhelming the board or anything, so I wouldn't want to make anything worse for any new users we might get, which isn't that many anyway! So I'd probably say leave it for now, but keep an eye on the situation.

@matija is that really how they elected the president? How did they vote?

Hi, as a fairly busy researcher, I still want to understand to whatever degree possible the context of the rise of the Third Reich and fascism in Germany. What factors enabled or failed to frustrate this rise in terms of the structure of the German government? For example, leading up to the rise, what was the parliamentary structure? How, if at all, was power separated between branches of government? What form of voting system was used—was it a proportional representation system? What do scholars speculate about in terms of what changes to the structure of government might have checked, frustrated or disabled the rise of fascism there?

Some answers to these are obvious, but I wanted to ask these questions openly to spur a conversation about the roles of these factors in the failure to keep fascism in check. For example, one speculation is that PR was a factor, leading to an unstable government as parties arose, formed and broke coalitions, and dissolved. This led to a weak legislative branch of government. With this in mind, how can we design or provide counterbalances to systems of proportional representation that don’t suffer from the same vulnerability to fragmentation and instability?

Another aspect was the capability of the executive to seize essentially unilateral control in “emergency” events.

If anybody has insight about this, I think this is an important discussion to have.