Note to moderators and all: I'm putting this in Legislative Discussion because it relates to the various electoral reform proposals, but since I tend to be broader in my thoughts than a critique of a particular bill, I put it in its own thread.
Much of the current back and forth about voting for particular candidates focuses on the premise that doing so would allow the people to more directly express their will about who shall serve in the RA. Electoral systems have another function which these proposals aren't yet addressing. They shape the political culture.
After six RA elections, we know quite a bit about how our current system shapes our politics. I think it does a couple of things,
First, it creates issue focus. Those who wish to serve must either line up behind an existing faction platform, or write one. To this point, those platforms have mattered. Voters have, more often than not, rewarded political groups who make specific proposals about the direction the community should go and penalize (relatively , see below) those that don't.
In every election I've seen in the real world that has one voting for a person, the campaign has become one of personality , dominated by mass media and carefully created image, rather than by substantive discussions of policy. I'd love to hear of real world counter examples, btw. Campaigns that focus on whose poster is bigger are not our community at its best.
Second and much more importantly , our system encourages a political culture built on consensus, The use of the Saint-Lague method favors the inclusion of many factions in the RA. In fact ,there has never in the history of the RA been a situation where there was more than a one seat difference between the faction with the most seats and that with the fewest. Nor has there ever been a faction which stood in an RA election without winning at least one RA seat. This makes parliamentary majorities hard to come by if there are more than two factions. Therefore there must be compromise if legislation is to move forward. Also, everyone's first preference (faction) was represented in the RA,
To demonstrate how a small change can significantly affect the political climate. I crunched the numbers from the last two elections using the current Sainte-Lague method (divisor of 2s+1) and the d'Hondt method (divisor of s+1) An alteration of method does not change the results of the most recent election. However, when we look back to the January election , the two methods would have yielded different results. Sainte-Lague gave us 2 DPU-1 CSDF-1 SP-1 CARE. Had we used D'hondt, we would have had 2 DPU - 2 CSDF - 1 SP - 0 CARE. All this is caused by a tiny change in a math formula.
The proposal to elect individuals directly would be a much bigger change. Especially if combined with dividing the CDS into constituencies, it would make it much more likely that a political group would gain an actual majority, lessening the incentive to compromise and create solutions acceptable to all, even if the final legislation is nobody's first choice.
Before we enact this, we ought at least to really look at what it might do. For example, pay someone to code up a voting booth using the proposed new system and have at least one mock election. Also someone with more math skills ought to look at the question of the smallest proportion of citizen votes that could elect a parliamentary majority under a proposed new system.