MMP Referendum >> Can someone explain this?

[bradm]

I'd have no problem voting for MMP if (when it actually gets implemented, assuming there aren't any snags along the way) it was put in provisionally (10 years, or three elections, or something like that), with regular evaluations of known/stated (and debated) criteria, both of the electoral system itelf, and the governments produced by it. If it passed (with a passing grade having been set before the system was implemented), it would be kept; if not, we'd go back to FPP.

This sounds tempting, but I'm not at all clear on how this could be made concrete. I'd be open to a commitment to an opposite referendum in a, say, 5 year timeframe, if that is the sort of thing you are getting at.

No, I'm thinking more of hard numbers. Take, for example, gender diversity, which is easy to measure: the percentage of legislature members that are women. (Ethnic diversity would also be easy to measure, but would need to be compared with the varying ethnic diversity of the overall population.)

Now, right off the bat, there's a probem, because (in my opinion) it's misleading to compare the gender diversity of the legislature to the gender diversity of the overall population (particularly to justify claims of bias in an electoral process), because that assumes that the elected members are selected from the overall population, and they're not: they're selected from the candidates nominated/selected by the parties (by the parties' rules). (A 25% female legislature might actually be biased towards women, if 10% of the candidates were women.)

What I'd like to see is something like this: take every Ontario election since, say, 1900, and apply a "diversity measurement" (gender, or ethnicity) to the sets of candidates, and the sets of elected members, and see what's gone on. (Obviously, with gender, the first bunch [i'm not sure how many] of elections will be biased, because women not only didn't run back then, they weren't able to vote. Even after women started voting and running, there'll be a bit of "demographic inertia" before the rest of society caught up to the "new" idea of women in politics.) Doing a timeline of the diversity numbers against significant events (wars, economic stuff, constitional changes, etc.) would also be useful.

Then, again assuming MMP were implemented, wait a few elections, and run the numbers again, at least to see if things are getting "better" (both in terms of who's elected and who's running), and, ideally, to see if the introduction of MMP had achieved a stated-ahead-of-time pass/fail criteria. (In essence, I don't care how MMP will increase diversity, I just want to see if it will have increased it.)

(Measuring how effective the governments are is a whole other problem. I saw one commentator on the electoral referendum who noted that the citizens' group who debated and then selected MMP actually didn't include any notion of "producing effective governments" in its selection criteria, focusing instead on diversity and fairness. OK, if MMP is supposed to increase diversity, let's define it, quantify it, measure it, and evaluate how well changes are helping/hindering it.)

Aloha,

Brad

[Ol'Hickster]

Im all for it