But, the fact that the entire list is voted for together means that while all the individual candidates may have some effect on the general election outcome, none of the individual candidates are directly accountable individually to the general electorate.
The key word here is not "accountable", but "individually". It's true that you can't throw out B with also throwing out C and D who are below him on the list - at least in closed list systems - but is this a problem? If a party nominates a bad politician, isn't that a problem with the party?
I think the party itself need to pay the price for it, not just the politician in question. What I think people in FPTP systems miss, is that we have better parties in PR systems. This is because we keep them accountable, as well as the candidates themselves.
Because of Duverger's law, FPTP systems will gravitate towards two major parties. This means parties have a great deal of clout with the voters and members. "So what if we're corrupt, and our internal democracy sucks? We still support slightly more of your positions than the others (and they are corrupt too). Our way or the highway."
They don't get to do that here. "Back room deals" are not tolerated. If the central leadership tries to dictate local lists (or regional, if you insist: they are naturally somewhat larger districts than single-member), active members will desert them in droves.
And they have no seats that are so "safe" that they can afford to offend local sensibilities - in a FPTP system, central leadership could dictate who the candidate will be in a 75% district, stepping on the toes of the locals. They might lose 20% for it, but so? that would just mean less wasted votes. They'd still win.
One thing the Brits will have to get used to sooner or later anyway, is that that local link will be stretched. There are very many members of parliament already, and the population isn't sinking as far as I know. How many can they put in there? 1000? 2000? at some point it gets impractical.
You're not an idiot, but you are a poor judge of the true intentions of people you don't know. We all are. Even if candidates are smart enough to do these symbolic things to their electorate (turn up to give out prizes, etc.), doesn't mean they are nice. It's pretty easy to give a good impression to your neighbors.
Don't you agree that you know better the people you work with? The people you have to rely on, who rely on you? IME, when you're cooperating with people to get hard stuff done, you get to know them better than you sometimes want to.
They might well know, but are they going to say - especially when they're just as bad and they've got their snouts in the same trough? I very much doubt it.
In a majoritarian system, no. They have very little choice in the matter. But you must remember that there are two kinds of power people seek through parties.
One is the power to influence decisions in a certain way. Political scientists call it I-power. You seek certain goals, you don't seek power for it's own sake. If you seek the power to run a conservative fiscal policy, you don't mind if anyone else has the power to run a conservative fiscal policy - you'll "share" that power freely.
But there is another kind of power. They call it P-power, for "purse" - how are you going to split the prize between you? This is the kind of power you want to share with as few people as possible. When forming a government coalition, as is done in the UK now, it's all about P-power. The parties want to rule, but they don't want a bigger coalition than absolutely necessary - because that would mean giving concessions and ministries you'd rather keep for yourself.
Now, by far the majority of rank and file party members seek the first kind of power. Unless it's the communist party of China or something, people who seek the second kind of power are rare. But - and this is true in PR systems too, but especially in majoritarian systems - party members who seek office are usually more than a little interested in P-power in addition to I-power.
Now we get back to the point. In a sense, party members and party leadership/office seekers don't "eat from the same through". They are allies, but the leaders seek something the rank and file do not - and that the R&F are in fact reluctant to give them.
In PR, the rank and file can sometimes rein in candidates who seek personal influence. Not always - personal popularity is a consideration here, too. I've seen a case where a formerly large, now almost vanished political party found themselves a charismatic leader, and proceeded to jettison almost all from their old politics, except an empty slogan or two.
But in majoritarian/personal popularity system (this includes MMP!), it would be so much worse. Arguably, what happened to the tiny party I mentioned, happened with a major party in the UK, namely Labour!
I'm not speaking out of theoretical considerations here, you know. I live in a country where there is a multiple district PR system - by far the most common kind. That "local" doesn't exist is maybe true of Israel (and there single-district arguably makes some sense), but it's not true of Norway.
I have always had the option to vote for representatives from close to where I live - even when I lived in a small rural municipality. And I understand how the parties choose their reps.
they reduce the direct accountability of individual elected officials to the general electorate.
So they say. But is this really true? In PR systems, we know which regional seats are "in play", most likely to switch. The people on the marginal parts of the lists are undoubtedly most important - and we know who they are. But if the list top is unpopular, they will take a hit for it.
There are usually a lot of "safe seats" in majoritarian systems as well, especially with gerrymandering. If the party decides to put an unpopular candidate in a safe district, they may take a hit - but odds are it will be one that doesn't matter, since they will win anyway. Only "wasted votes", not needed to elect the candidate anyway, will be lost.
I want to vote for individuals. I hate party politics.
I kind of understand this sentiment, but it's nonetheless wrongheaded. People can be charismatic. They can fool you, and they do. You think you know what your individual candidate is like, but it's very unlikely that you do. You're influenced (whether you want to or not) by all the campaigning on whether this or that candidate is "reliable" and "can be trusted", etc. instead of the issues which really matter.
It's never easy to judge people's character, even when they're people you know. You get candidates which are experts at appearing to be trustworthy and reliable. But only their closest know, and maybe not even then - just look at all the personal scandals.
But you know who can judge a politician's integrity rather well? The people who work with him. His party colleagues, the ones he worked his way up with (or which he stepped on to get up). Regular party members. They will know if he is a hypocritical ass.
The sad thing is, in personality-oriented electoral systems, they say, "well, he's an ass, but he's at least our ass - most of the time. When he hasn't listened too much to his corporate buddies. And he looks good on TV, we have no choice, we can't win without him" In party program oriented systems, they say "We want someone who can actually be trusted to implement the program we decided. If this guy won't do it, let's find another."
Now compare with parties. Parties suck at being charismatic. That's a feature, not a bug. They're institutions. Like people, they are occasionally a bit dodgy. But they're bad at hiding it. People don't love them and trust them the way they would trust a person. Parties are tools, and in PR systems, rather effective ones. Party programs, declarations and manifestos actually matter somewhat here. They aren't just airy statements of the attitudes of the people already supporting the party, they're statements about how those attitudes should be put into practice. For all the complaining about broken promises, they also manage to keep a lot of them.
> The party membership choose who's on the list, and in what order.
Fixed that for you, in order to remove the classic FUD.
This is how it actually works in most proportional representation countries. Party members decide locally who their candidates will be. Very rarely they may be convinced to "take one for the team", and nominate an important national politician who otherwise faces unacceptable risks, but this is a desperate move.
In open list countries, voters can also rearrange the lists as they choose, so even if a party leadership with a democratic deficit managed to trump through their candidate (through expulsions, threats or other organizational gamemanship), he would face a coordinated campaign to rearrange him to the bottom come election day.
Basically, no. That is just so harebrained it's barely worth replying to.
Look, 10 million brits want the conservatives to rule. But over 15 million agree that they don't want that. If they don't want it badly enough, they are allowed to form a coalition to prevent it.
If the vote in UK was fragmented even more, so the sane vote was spread over twenty parties, allowing the CFF party to become the largest, that would not mean the Crazed Fascist Fucks would be entitled to rule. No, not even if they were the party that made the most gains. The sane voters would expect and demand their squabbling representatives to form a coalition. The current situation is no different.
The "two losing parties"? First of all, it seems the Lib Dems will support the Conservatives, not Labour. Second, if you look at actual popular vote, you'll see that Labour and Lib Dem combined still have 15 million votes to the conservatives' 10. If the Lib Dem and Labour voters want a coalition (and it looks like the Lib Dems at least plan to ask them before committing to anything), they still have a completely legitimate government - despite the relative setback in this election.
The only "advantage" the UK has over the US system, if you can call it that, is that they have smaller districts. It's not much of an advantage, because having over 600 MPs is a problem in itself. But it does mean that minor parties have a very distant shot at influence.
Wow. It is funny, but it also explains some behavior from certain of my friends that have so far confused me, namely "Why on earth do you try to give the impression that you are a perpetually drunk skiing instructor, when I know you're in fact down to earth and quietly likeable?"
And why did it become that success? Because facebook denied you some privacy right away, namely the freedom to be there under a pseudonym. They may be asses in many ways, but they owe their success to showing people that sharing personal information can be useful, not just dangerous.
Not on nearly the same scale. You can still sell your MtG cards on ebay. WotC also are not abusing their resellers to anything near the same degrees.
What you could say they have in common is that they are ripping off their customers. And WotC used to be a lot better (open gaming license, selling PDF versions), so they are moving in the wrong direction. But they are still a long, long way away from GW.
> readers may *believe* it has no effect, but there's enough scientific studies proving that it does and quite measurably so.
Fair enough, but where? And do they hold water, or is it true as claimed above, that the most legible font is whatever the local newspaper happens to be using?
There is a simple pricing scheme that obtains what you want (price discrimination):
They offer the font for sale, and say that it will be published (and free to use) if they've got offers totalling 100000$ or more in the next month. Then everyone who cares enough to pay for it, offer what it's worth for them. If it adds up to 100000$ or more, the font makers take the money and release the font, if not, nothing changes hands. This is fair, and it works.
This scheme was pioneered by fundable.org (now defunct), and has since been taken up by others (notably kickstarter, which is focused on purchases).
A lot of pioneering creative works are actually sold using this methods. But human psychology makes us place higher value on a recurring revenue stream than a one off-payment, even when the expected value of the recurring payment is smaller. Creative entrepreneurs, especially those so narrow and specialized as font designers, have a tendency to overvalue their work. With recurring revenue, they feel they get something closer to what they deserve, so changing attitudes will be hard work.
True. The ones educated enough to appreciate these things are probably also far more likely to overvalue it compared to normal people. Therefore they will demand excessive prices. Therefore this will not take off. Therefore web pages will continue to look a little sloppy.
And that person/people SHOULD be paid for the insane amount of work required to prepare even the basic latin alphabet in all these variations, let alone implementing decent unicode support...
Fair enough, but should they be paid every time the font is used? I think once should be enough. If you have a font to sell me, feel free to put it up at http://www.kickstarter.com/ and send me a message.
The author writes on the plugin's page that he doesn't have time to maintain it any longer, and is looking for someone to take over. Apparently it was a thesis of some sort and now it's done (sad fate of much interesting academic software).
Slashdot Mirror
Explicit memory management is hard.
"C" is a more common standalone token than "Java". Try googling "Java language" vs. "C language".
The key word here is not "accountable", but "individually". It's true that you can't throw out B with also throwing out C and D who are below him on the list - at least in closed list systems - but is this a problem? If a party nominates a bad politician, isn't that a problem with the party?
I think the party itself need to pay the price for it, not just the politician in question. What I think people in FPTP systems miss, is that we have better parties in PR systems. This is because we keep them accountable, as well as the candidates themselves.
Because of Duverger's law, FPTP systems will gravitate towards two major parties. This means parties have a great deal of clout with the voters and members. "So what if we're corrupt, and our internal democracy sucks? We still support slightly more of your positions than the others (and they are corrupt too). Our way or the highway."
They don't get to do that here. "Back room deals" are not tolerated. If the central leadership tries to dictate local lists (or regional, if you insist: they are naturally somewhat larger districts than single-member), active members will desert them in droves.
And they have no seats that are so "safe" that they can afford to offend local sensibilities - in a FPTP system, central leadership could dictate who the candidate will be in a 75% district, stepping on the toes of the locals. They might lose 20% for it, but so? that would just mean less wasted votes. They'd still win.
One thing the Brits will have to get used to sooner or later anyway, is that that local link will be stretched. There are very many members of parliament already, and the population isn't sinking as far as I know. How many can they put in there? 1000? 2000? at some point it gets impractical.
You're not an idiot, but you are a poor judge of the true intentions of people you don't know. We all are. Even if candidates are smart enough to do these symbolic things to their electorate (turn up to give out prizes, etc.), doesn't mean they are nice. It's pretty easy to give a good impression to your neighbors.
Don't you agree that you know better the people you work with? The people you have to rely on, who rely on you? IME, when you're cooperating with people to get hard stuff done, you get to know them better than you sometimes want to.
In a majoritarian system, no. They have very little choice in the matter. But you must remember that there are two kinds of power people seek through parties.
One is the power to influence decisions in a certain way. Political scientists call it I-power. You seek certain goals, you don't seek power for it's own sake. If you seek the power to run a conservative fiscal policy, you don't mind if anyone else has the power to run a conservative fiscal policy - you'll "share" that power freely.
But there is another kind of power. They call it P-power, for "purse" - how are you going to split the prize between you? This is the kind of power you want to share with as few people as possible. When forming a government coalition, as is done in the UK now, it's all about P-power. The parties want to rule, but they don't want a bigger coalition than absolutely necessary - because that would mean giving concessions and ministries you'd rather keep for yourself.
Now, by far the majority of rank and file party members seek the first kind of power. Unless it's the communist party of China or something, people who seek the second kind of power are rare. But - and this is true in PR systems too, but especially in majoritarian systems - party members who seek office are usually more than a little interested in P-power in addition to I-power.
Now we get back to the point. In a sense, party members and party leadership/office seekers don't "eat from the same through". They are allies, but the leaders seek something the rank and file do not - and that the R&F are in fact reluctant to give them.
In PR, the rank and file can sometimes rein in candidates who seek personal influence. Not always - personal popularity is a consideration here, too. I've seen a case where a formerly large, now almost vanished political party found themselves a charismatic leader, and proceeded to jettison almost all from their old politics, except an empty slogan or two.
But in majoritarian/personal popularity system (this includes MMP!), it would be so much worse. Arguably, what happened to the tiny party I mentioned, happened with a major party in the UK, namely Labour!
There's been rumors. Extremely useful rumors for Apple, I might add.
More FUD, myths and ignorance.
I'm not speaking out of theoretical considerations here, you know. I live in a country where there is a multiple district PR system - by far the most common kind. That "local" doesn't exist is maybe true of Israel (and there single-district arguably makes some sense), but it's not true of Norway.
I have always had the option to vote for representatives from close to where I live - even when I lived in a small rural municipality. And I understand how the parties choose their reps.
So they say. But is this really true? In PR systems, we know which regional seats are "in play", most likely to switch. The people on the marginal parts of the lists are undoubtedly most important - and we know who they are. But if the list top is unpopular, they will take a hit for it.
There are usually a lot of "safe seats" in majoritarian systems as well, especially with gerrymandering. If the party decides to put an unpopular candidate in a safe district, they may take a hit - but odds are it will be one that doesn't matter, since they will win anyway. Only "wasted votes", not needed to elect the candidate anyway, will be lost.
I kind of understand this sentiment, but it's nonetheless wrongheaded. People can be charismatic. They can fool you, and they do. You think you know what your individual candidate is like, but it's very unlikely that you do. You're influenced (whether you want to or not) by all the campaigning on whether this or that candidate is "reliable" and "can be trusted", etc. instead of the issues which really matter.
It's never easy to judge people's character, even when they're people you know. You get candidates which are experts at appearing to be trustworthy and reliable. But only their closest know, and maybe not even then - just look at all the personal scandals.
But you know who can judge a politician's integrity rather well? The people who work with him. His party colleagues, the ones he worked his way up with (or which he stepped on to get up). Regular party members. They will know if he is a hypocritical ass.
The sad thing is, in personality-oriented electoral systems, they say, "well, he's an ass, but he's at least our ass - most of the time. When he hasn't listened too much to his corporate buddies. And he looks good on TV, we have no choice, we can't win without him" In party program oriented systems, they say "We want someone who can actually be trusted to implement the program we decided. If this guy won't do it, let's find another."
Now compare with parties. Parties suck at being charismatic. That's a feature, not a bug. They're institutions. Like people, they are occasionally a bit dodgy. But they're bad at hiding it. People don't love them and trust them the way they would trust a person. Parties are tools, and in PR systems, rather effective ones. Party programs, declarations and manifestos actually matter somewhat here. They aren't just airy statements of the attitudes of the people already supporting the party, they're statements about how those attitudes should be put into practice. For all the complaining about broken promises, they also manage to keep a lot of them.
> The party membership choose who's on the list, and in what order.
Fixed that for you, in order to remove the classic FUD.
This is how it actually works in most proportional representation countries. Party members decide locally who their candidates will be. Very rarely they may be convinced to "take one for the team", and nominate an important national politician who otherwise faces unacceptable risks, but this is a desperate move.
In open list countries, voters can also rearrange the lists as they choose, so even if a party leadership with a democratic deficit managed to trump through their candidate (through expulsions, threats or other organizational gamemanship), he would face a coordinated campaign to rearrange him to the bottom come election day.
Basically, no. That is just so harebrained it's barely worth replying to.
Look, 10 million brits want the conservatives to rule. But over 15 million agree that they don't want that. If they don't want it badly enough, they are allowed to form a coalition to prevent it.
If the vote in UK was fragmented even more, so the sane vote was spread over twenty parties, allowing the CFF party to become the largest, that would not mean the Crazed Fascist Fucks would be entitled to rule. No, not even if they were the party that made the most gains. The sane voters would expect and demand their squabbling representatives to form a coalition. The current situation is no different.
The "two losing parties"? First of all, it seems the Lib Dems will support the Conservatives, not Labour. Second, if you look at actual popular vote, you'll see that Labour and Lib Dem combined still have 15 million votes to the conservatives' 10. If the Lib Dem and Labour voters want a coalition (and it looks like the Lib Dems at least plan to ask them before committing to anything), they still have a completely legitimate government - despite the relative setback in this election.
The only "advantage" the UK has over the US system, if you can call it that, is that they have smaller districts. It's not much of an advantage, because having over 600 MPs is a problem in itself. But it does mean that minor parties have a very distant shot at influence.
Wow. It is funny, but it also explains some behavior from certain of my friends that have so far confused me, namely "Why on earth do you try to give the impression that you are a perpetually drunk skiing instructor, when I know you're in fact down to earth and quietly likeable?"
And why did it become that success? Because facebook denied you some privacy right away, namely the freedom to be there under a pseudonym. They may be asses in many ways, but they owe their success to showing people that sharing personal information can be useful, not just dangerous.
I had to look up "douche canoe" and "mansplain", but I'm glad I did.
Not on nearly the same scale. You can still sell your MtG cards on ebay. WotC also are not abusing their resellers to anything near the same degrees.
What you could say they have in common is that they are ripping off their customers. And WotC used to be a lot better (open gaming license, selling PDF versions), so they are moving in the wrong direction. But they are still a long, long way away from GW.
> readers may *believe* it has no effect, but there's enough scientific studies proving that it does and quite measurably so.
Fair enough, but where? And do they hold water, or is it true as claimed above, that the most legible font is whatever the local newspaper happens to be using?
You mean like the Liberation fonts?
There is a simple pricing scheme that obtains what you want (price discrimination):
They offer the font for sale, and say that it will be published (and free to use) if they've got offers totalling 100000$ or more in the next month. Then everyone who cares enough to pay for it, offer what it's worth for them. If it adds up to 100000$ or more, the font makers take the money and release the font, if not, nothing changes hands. This is fair, and it works.
This scheme was pioneered by fundable.org (now defunct), and has since been taken up by others (notably kickstarter, which is focused on purchases).
A lot of pioneering creative works are actually sold using this methods. But human psychology makes us place higher value on a recurring revenue stream than a one off-payment, even when the expected value of the recurring payment is smaller. Creative entrepreneurs, especially those so narrow and specialized as font designers, have a tendency to overvalue their work. With recurring revenue, they feel they get something closer to what they deserve, so changing attitudes will be hard work.
People also use it for lack of a decent "handwriting style" font. If there are any good, freely available alternatives for that, I'd like to know.
Thou shalt use metafont like thy father and thy father before that! Knuth has commanded it!
True. The ones educated enough to appreciate these things are probably also far more likely to overvalue it compared to normal people. Therefore they will demand excessive prices. Therefore this will not take off. Therefore web pages will continue to look a little sloppy.
Fair enough, but should they be paid every time the font is used? I think once should be enough. If you have a font to sell me, feel free to put it up at http://www.kickstarter.com/ and send me a message.
I WILL pay. Just not over and over for eternity.
The author writes on the plugin's page that he doesn't have time to maintain it any longer, and is looking for someone to take over. Apparently it was a thesis of some sort and now it's done (sad fate of much interesting academic software).
Linux is hard. Let's go shopping!