Election Geekery

[totherme]

I've been offline for a bit while I panic about thesis stuff - but an election's happening here in the UK, so I thought I'd take a moment to link to a couple of handy tools:

Vote For Policies

Who should you vote for?Both of these sites anonymise the policies of our major parties, to allow you to see how well your tribal instincts match up with

Comments

elections

[anonymous]

Hope you don't mind me commenting - Susz's dad - I tend to just watch to keep up to date with her public posts, but I do have some background in social sciences around elections/stats etc. The main thing that bothers me about this election is that it's only the last month or so that people, including commentators, have started mentioning the possibility of a hung parliament. If you look at the maths, it's been the likely outcome for over 2 years on visible swings. First past the post voting systems heavily encourage what can look like tribal voting as they amplify the impact of local swings in marginal seats

Re: elections

[totherme]

All comments are welcome :)

Yeah - I'm aware of some of the relative properties of first past the post systems vs PR systems, and I'm quite looking forward to seeing what happens in practice if we really do end up with a hung parliament. And I'm aware that a good strategy for a party in the current system is to play personality politics, and to concentrate on swing seats...

The thing that I'm only just starting to think about is trying to figure out what we want, as distinct from what we have, in a political system. Do we want people to vote for personality? Do we want people to vote for policies? Do we want people to vote for a political tribe, or a particular point on the Nolan chart? Do we want some combination of the above, or something I haven't thought of yet

Re: elections

[anonymous]

Under the current system, it's a bit like letting the winning football team be the referee for its next match. NB there are lots of PR systems - some of them just as bad at encouraging binary swings as first past the post. The likely ones to be proposed tend to encourage either unstable coalition/horse trading or difficult to dislodge stability/consensus. My own view is that this election is going to be more interesting in its aftermath - lots of policy/positional horse trading, leadership shifting and probable indecision on any non-consensus issues.
NB None of the politicians are talking in much detail about the really polarising issues - Europe, immigration, spending cuts, tax increases etc. (though they do have views)

Re: elections

[ext_231682]

Hi there! I've been thinking about this lately too. In fact, we might even be on the same wavelength :) I've been building a Haskell library (currently called Votelib [3] on Github) that will address some of these issues. To summarize, it will combine Maximum Majority Voting [1] with Delegable Proxy Voting [2

[brokenhut]

Hello, commenter coming in via Planet Haskell...

I agree with you about the difficulty of reading through the policy bullet points on Vote For Policies. Though I wonder if that's more to do with the incredible vagueness of the policies. What do you know, everyone wants to improve healthcare/education/justice! The only parties which were visibly exact with what they wanted to do were the ones I was least likely to vote for --- bringing back corporal punishment and Christian assemblies in schools, and other Moral Majority-style stuff. (I guess these policies were from UKIP though I haven't checked.) All the others were quite wishy-washy such that I ended up choosing 50% green, 25% labour, 25% conservative.

I shall have a look at the other site when I get a free moment!

[johnckirk]

Thanks for the links - I really need to spend some time looking at policies before the election, although after midnight probably isn't the best time to start :)

I've voted LibDem at almost every election so far (local/national), but that's mainly because I liked what they said about Proportional Representation when I was at school. I'm aware of the counterargument (fringe groups having to form coalitions), but if you want a strong government then you could simply say that the winning party gets all the seats. However, I've now seen the BNP win two Euro MP seats due to PR, which makes me wonder whether it's not such a great idea after all.

Taking a quick glance at the questions, my first reaction to lots of them is "Meh, I dunno." Ideally, I'd like to say "Party X seem to have some sensible people, so I'll delegate my vote to them, once they've researched the subject in depth." However, it's tricky to decide which party is sensible unless I already know about the policies...

Benevolent dictator, that's the way forward!

[sapopoem]

found your site on del.icio.us today and really liked it.. i bookmarked it and will be back to check it out some more later

[qibotuff]

I’ve been into blogging for quite some time and this is definitely a great post.Cheers!