I have been thinking quite a bit about this issue, especially as Bromo and others argue that we have personality politics in spite of ourselves. We are debating vigorously whether or not citizens should be asked to vote for parties/platforms or for individuals. The problem is, that is probably the least important influence on the basis people actually have for their votes.
My starting thesis is as follows:
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The likelihood that voters will base their vote on their impression of a person rather than on their impression of a party or platform correlates directly and strongly with[/b:34hbn9yg]
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1) The degree to which they believe a particular vote will result in a particular person being elected
AND
2) The amount of information they have about the persons who may be elected.[/b:34hbn9yg]
Let me do #2 first. In a small community one is likely to have lots of information about potential officeholders because you know them personally. In a larger electorate, this personal knowledge is replaced by that gained from advertisements. Witness the fact that most USA political ads say "VOTE ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER , Republican, for governor" Rather than "VOTE REPUBLICAN, here are our candidates".
The only case where people are asked to vote for individuals and substitute party is when the amount of information about the candidates is low (for example, a partisan election for dig catcher in a medium sized city where you've never met either candidate and neither advertises heavily)
The CDS electorate has a great deal of information about its candidates, both because we're small, and because a significant proportion of our candidates have, in the past, done individual campaign posters and emails.
Now on to #1.
If you are asked to vote for individuals, this is a given. A vote (or perhaps I should say enough votes) for John Doe will cause John Doe to be elected.
Even if one is asked to vote for a party, one can be fairly certain that a vote will result in a particular person being elected if either of the following things happen.
1) Parties publish their ranked lists ahead of time. The CSDF has talked about doing this, though I'm not sure they did it explicitly. However, announcing that Moon was a preferred candidate for chancellor at least implied that she would end up at the bottom of the CSDF RA list.
2) The order of a party list is unknown, but the names on that list are known and there is a low ratio of candidates standing from a party to the number of seats that party is likely to win.
Take the SP in the most recent election. They announced a list of two candidates. If you know anything about Sainte-Lague ( see my other recent post on this), you know that unless they did very poorly in the election, both those people would end up on RA. The higher the ratio of candidates to likely seats, the less certain a vote for a faction will result in a particular person being elected.
The original constitution writers tried to keep the likelihood that a vote for a faction would result in candidate X by....
*allowing only faction members to rank individuals
* making that ranking of individuals happen as part of the same secret ballot as all voters' ranking of factions
* (at least in the early days) not publishing candidate lists
Because of the decision made (by factions and the SC) in the last couple of elections, the last two no longer happen in practice.
Earlier I asked, "Is personality politics inevitable?" Maybe I just answered my own question.