Ideal Representation: Difference between revisions

==Introduction and Discussion==

 

 

The allocation of representatives to citizens is the primary issue of a representative democracy. For example, if the assembly contains 100 seats to fill, it still needs to be decided how citizens are to elect representatives for each seat. The historically most common and simplest way to do this is to have citizens grouped so that each group is entitled to elect who fills each seat. Forming each group at random from the population is clearly not useful, since the groups would be less prone to have a unique message for representation than other groupings. Since elections are in principle a delegative process, the primary split line between groups should be based on some feature of the citizens.

[[Regional Systems]] tend to have a high degree of [[Proportionate Representation]] and [[Partisan Systems]] tend to have a high degree of [[Proportional Representation]]. It is important to clearly distinguish between the design structure of a system and the expected outcome for each type of representation. All systems either have some amount of Proportional Representation although it may not be able to be defined adequately. [[Proportionate Representation]] is more difficult because in systems where there are no defined regions no useful statement can be made. However, many systems commonly have outcomes where some regions or parties elect no representatives even though they have the population to warrant representation.

 

 

Despite the apparent symmetry between Regional and Partisan systems it is better to think of them as opposites in a number of ways. A country can be divided into constituencies of equivalent population with relative ease to guarantee [[Proportionate Representation]] at the finest grain. However, the space of political opinions cannot be divided in such a manner so political parties are used as a grouping for [[Proportional Representation]]. In most [[Regional Systems]], there are an equal number of seats per region by design but in [[Partisan Systems]] the number of seats per party is determined by the election itself. Parties overlap in the opinion space and there are often minority views which do not have the power to start a party. This means, the delegation process is less clear in Partisan Systems as not all citizens have a political stance represented by an elected party so not all citizens have a representative. Since this tends to affect minority groups more often Partisan Systems then to result in a lack of representation for individuals who already do not have much political power. On the other hand, citizens who are adherents of a political party can have many associated representatives organized by the party. They gain political power through this organization. Furthermore, it is unclear in such systems if all members represent the same number of citizens and [[Balanced Representation]] is fulfilled. A citizen may have regional interests outside of the region they happen to reside in. A citizen with a particular ideological position is very unlikely to advocate for other ideological positions.

 

While the sortition is useful for the though experiment there are a number of issues. The most glaring is that a random sampling would not select quality candidates but average candidates. One wants an election system which selects the average person in the Opinion Space but the best the country has to offer in terms of credentials and virtue. While many criticize that the quality of politicians is low few would dispute that the average politician is better at being a politician than the average citizen. The more complex issue with defining a [[sortition]] as the best system based on [[Ideal Representation]] is that this "Opinion Space" is only hypothetical. In fact, this space could be different for each person in a way that makes combining them impossible.