Subject: message from Tom Round:[Fwd: Postscript on PR and district magnitudes]

From: Rick Hasen

Date: 2/17/2004, 7:51 PM

To: election-law

-------- Original Message --------

Subject:	Postscript on PR and district magnitudes
Date:	Wed, 18 Feb 2004 11:33:54 +1000
From:	Tom Round <t.round@griffith.edu.au>
To:	owner-election-law_gl@majordomo.lls.edu

By the way, I note the comment someone made a few weeks ago that elimination (or, "reduction below the point of practicability") of gerrymandering was not, on its own, sufficient reason to adopt proportional representation with multi-seat electoral districts.

I accept this argument as valid, so far as it goes. I myself am an STV advocate, obviously. I accept that STV has costs (most notably, the fact that each electoral district will contain a larger area and voter population), but I believe that on balance its benefits outweigh these costs. So it's an added bonus that (as former Irish Prime Minister Garrett Fitzgerald once wrote) multi-seat electorates have far fewer kilometres [sorry, miles!] of boundaries than do single-seat electorates, meaning fewer opportunities, ceteris paribus, to use those boundaries to split like-minded communities of voters into different constituencies.

It's like saying "If you don't smoke, you'll save money". Depending on the weight of other factors, that may be the tie-breaker, although on its own "save money" is almost never decisive for anyone.

PS:        No offence intended, but it sounds very odd from here for American political scientists to warn that proportional representation will destroy or undermine the two-party system. Compared to most other western democracies, US parties are so loose that, in practice, there is already a ... well, "multi-party" might be going too far, but "multi-factional" system, even including nominal party colleagues voting against each other in the legislature and, at primary time, campaigning furiously against each other with separate electoral organisations behind them.

So it's not as if first-past-the-post gives the US a newly-elected (say) Democrat president with a solid party of Democrat Congressreps and Senators behind him (or, after 2008, her) who campaign at the hustings and then vote in the legislature as a disciplined block. (I understand that the Republican congressional leadership has been unusually strict in disciplining its Reps during the Bush II term, but from what I gather this is considered highly non-traditional.)

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Dr Tom Round
BA (Hons), LLB (UQ), PhD (Griff)
Research Fellow, Key Centre for Ethics,
   Law, Justice and Governance (KCELJAG)
Room 1.10, Macrossan Building, Nathan Campus
Griffith University, Queensland [Australia] 4111
Ph:        (061 or 07) 3875 3817
Mobile:   0438 167 304
Fax:       (061 or 07) 3875 6634
E-mail:    T.Round@gu.edu.au
Web:       http://www.gu.edu.au/centre/KCELJAG/
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