Tag Archive for electoral reform

Robin Green | 7 May 2012
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Tactical voting in the London mayoral elections

Originally posted here, with 1 comment

I think this writer is right. Many London voters may have inverted their first and second preferences in a mistaken attempt to “tactically vote”, when in fact it is impossible to tactically vote that way in the London mayoral elections. (In the extremely unlikely worst case, you swing the election away from your real first preference; in the most likely case, the inversion has no effect at all.) Others, who voted for two no-hopers, may not have realised that they had to choose between Ken and Boris for their “second preference” if they wanted to have any effect. However, it is of course only the latter type of mistake that could have realistically influenced the outcome.

The London mayoral voting system is meant to be simple, but as software developers know, even the simplest of systems can have the potential to confuse users, and what an expert thinks is simple is not always the same as what a user finds most simple.

(Sunny Hundal’s error in the opposite direction, mentioned in the article, is arguably not an error at all, although it could be an error in the sense that he might get kicked out of the Labour party.)

Category: Politics | Tags: , ,
Robin Green | 22 April 2012
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Oil spills, GDP and pushing on a string

Originally posted here with 10 comments

I think arguments of the form “we shouldn’t pursue GDP because, ZOMG, oil spills increase GDP” are misguided.

As a practical matter, elected politicians don’t pursue GDP, they pursue votes. And voters don’t pursue GDP either.

I’d like to draw a leftfield analogy with morality. Christian theologians identified morality with what God said we should do, which had the obvious problem that it could not be extended to matters not mentioned in the Bible. Then some secular philosophers like Bentham tried to “discover” an objective, absolute and timeless standard for morality, which reproduced the religious delusion that morality is something out there in the world rather than a set of judgements made by groups of people based on reason, evidence, and shared values – values which are not necessarily universally shared. Now many philosophers recognise this point, more or less – but until then they were missing the point about the nature of morality, and as a result there was much misdirected effort.

While elected politicians do listen to economists, the people they ultimately listen to are voters. And voters already don’t consider GDP to be fundamentally very important, if they consider it at all. They may value closely-correlated concepts like reduced unemployment or growth in useful, productive activity, of course. And they may consider GDP (or real GDP) to be a useful proxy for those things, in normal times at least. But to some extent, this argument is already accepted by voters.

So once again, it arguably comes back to: do voters have sufficient influence over politicians? Do we need more democracy?

In a two-party system dominated by big money, like the US, voters have limited influence over politicians, because they can either switch between “left” or “right” or throw away their votes. In a multi-party system with proportional representation, voters can express a more nuanced opinion, and punish politicians effectively without having to betray their principles completely.

Category: Politics | Tags: , ,