Archive for April, 2011
More AV comment, from a colleague:
I voted “no”. Why?
1. Arrow’s theorem. Getting democracy “right” is mathematically impossible.
2. Elections are not there to select the “right” government, but to confer legitimacy on that which is elected, and to enable truly awful ones to be removed. FPTP is good enough.
3. Fiddling with the electoral maths is thinking too small. If you want to reform the system, and have a referendum on it, then a much more comprehensive reallocation of power between centre and edge is needed.
I’m not as impressed with Arrow’s theorem as a lot of people are – perhaps because I’m just more comfortable with better rather than perfect than my correspondent here is. Actually, having just been reading the wikipedia discussion, I have a couple of fundamental disagreements – notably that I don’t really have a problem with the notion that there is a potential case in which one “dictatorial” voter or coalition of voters decides the election. For a start, the whole point of an election is that the candidates try to secure the support of enough voters to win. Secondly, if who turns out to be the critical voter is random with respect to the demographic makeup of the electorate and not known in advance, there’s an argument that this would in fact be fair, in that it wouldn’t privilege any interest-group over any other. As it would be impossible to target them for campaigning purposes, politics would have to operate as if the system was formally fair in Arrow’s sense. Given the entrenched biases in the current system, this would in fact be a move towards justice.
Anyway, there’s nothing in Arrow to say that we should prefer a system that is pathological when it’s operating normally to one that is usually better but might have odd corner cases. It’s also ironic that economic libertarians get so hung up on Arrow when the same logic about Pareto efficiency is a well-known problem for free-market economics (making any given market more free doesn’t necessarily move the macroeconomy closer to full allocative efficiency).
The log says AFRICOM wants to know what’s up with B.727 msn 22045, ex of Irbis Air and now with “Mega” of Kazakhstan. Last heard of in Shymkent in January 2010, before that in Djibouti in 2008. I’ve no new information to add.
OK, so I’d just about reasoned myself around to voting no. But every time I get there I run into some nightmarish turdpool of mendacity from the no campaign. I may just not be able to stomach doing anything that George Osborne, John Reid, Robert Edmiston, Dan Hodges, and “Tom” “Newton”-“Dunn” agree with. I’d abstain, but that’s no solution.
To summarise yet again, the arguments are as follows, net-net:
Yes: It’s crap, and it doesn’t afford an immediate kick at the Lib Dems, but there might be some angle to be had from it and anyway everyone hates the Lib Dems.
No: Inchoate lashout.
I’m actually quite keen on policy based on gut hatred – there have been quite a few occasions over the last ten years when allowing yourself to be guided by tribal loyalty, practiced trigger-movements, and aesthetic revulsion would have put you in the right when a lot of people got it wrong based on reason. But the rules are the rules, and surely the fear and loathing factor must respond to the sheer horror of the no campaign.
If you were asked to write 1,572 words for a national newspaper on the role of voluntary associations in the Labour Movement, and thank the Lord neither you or I is likely to meet this fate any time soon, would you manage to mention trade unions at least once? Not if you’re Maurice Glasman. I don’t intend to waste much time on “Blue Labour”, but I do think this point needs to be made. Also, if you or I was to write such a slab, I think we’d make a better job of it. Here are a couple of pearls.
It required new work agreements so that all was not relentlessly up for grabs in an exclusively contractual churn.
In order to do this, Labour must establish those conversations that broker a common good within which party organisations such as Progress, the Fabians, Compass and the Christian Socialist Movement and Blue Labour talk and build a common programme.
The Obscurer seems to have anointed him as the new leader of Continuity Blairism, going by the eight handsome volumes it’s dedicated to the sage of Holloway Road’s thoughts on agriculture…sorry, the 1,572 words across a double centre page spread with a photo of him smoking cerebrally into the middle distance against a backdrop carefully blurred in line withOKTrends‘s empirically derived guidelines for successful online dating. This, next to a really Pravdaesque bit of sycophancy, from which I quote:
A source close to Miliband said the Labour leader was moved by what he heard as he munched on a bacon sandwich in Chrissy’s. “Ed met a porter who said the proudest day of his life was when he got his badge. His dad had been a porter and then he got his badge. We have nothing against people in call centres but I am not sure there would be the same emotion on being given a first telephone headset.”
“We have nothing against people in call centres”. But, it would seem, a lot of them are women and some are even black, and anyway they aren’t Proper Picturesque Proles for the TV, like. There are a whole lot of them, though, and perhaps they might have some of that emotion if more of them were in…a union. Perhaps I should start Glue Labour, for people who would rather sniff glue than read Maurice Glasman’s risible tosh. Suggestions for a motto are invited.
I’m beginning to make some progress with the lobbying project. Last week I got it spitting out data; in mid-week, I optimised the process of loading the meetings from the ScraperWiki API into NetworkX. Hint: the obj_hook keyword argument in python’s json.load() function is really useful!
This weekend it’s producing information about lobbies, ministers, and government departments. I’ve got implementations nearly ready for a couple more dimensions of data – providing each actor’s network degree by month, and trying to measure the extent to which ministers act as gatekeepers or flak-catchers. The first of those involves reimplementing a bit of NetworkX – you can’t ask for node properties excluding certain edges by attribute, or at least you can’t do so without creating a new subgraph, which seems ugly. The second, at the moment, counts the edges of a node if they have a higher weight than that of the node itself and expresses the sum of those edges’ weights as a percentage of the total meetings that minister had. That doesn’t take any account of time, yet.
I’m thinking of using Google App Engine to deploy it, running the data generator as a cron job and using the bulk uploader utility to slurp the results.
As a taster, the biggest single private interest lobbying Government is Barclays Bank, followed by Shell, the World Bank, the London Stock Exchange, BP, RBS, BAE, Standard Chartered, Lloyds, and Ratan Tata. This may not be that surprising. Neither is it very surprising, if somehow comforting in an old-fashioned way, that the two biggest lobbies of all are the Confederation of British Industry and the TUC, which is achieving about two-thirds the lobbying effort of the CBI and about twice that of Barclays. I was surprised to find that lobby 26 is Facebook, above Tesco, Microsoft, or UNISON. (Google is far, far down the list.) The highest placed individual trade union is the CWU at 24, between HSBC and the Electoral Commission. The littlest lobby is a nursery school in Leeds that got herded into a Big Society meeting with Nick Hurd MP.
I’m not so sure about using this model to assess the ministers, as we’re using a priori weightings on them. But the decision to lobby a given minister must contain some information about the lobbyist’s perceptions of their power and influence. Britain’s most lobbied minister is Chris Grayling MP, Minister of State for Employment, who achieves a weighted degree of 4.2, not far off twice the prime minister. David Willetts, Vince Cable, Nick Clegg, and Francis Maude are the next four before the prime minister. They range between 2.8 and 2.6 with the PM on 2.3. Britain’s least influential minister appears to be Baroness Warsi, minister without portfolio, on a score of 0.057.
BIS is the most lobbied department on 12.42, followed by the Department for Work and Pensions on 9.65, the Treasury on 7.065, the Cabinet Office on 5.62, and the DCLG on 3.825. Delight to the econophysicists (are they still around?): the distributions seem to show a nice power-law relationship! Which tells us what precisely? Well….not much except that it’s a social network and they usually have them!
There were 2,073 nodes, either ministers or lobbies, in the graph at the last data upload. 2,848 interactions between them were analysed.
Does anyone have any ideas for other metrics that might be interesting?
So I asked for your help to decide what I thought about the alternative vote.
A few of you were supportive on the grounds that it was a start and it would be possible to demand further improvement later.
NomadUK said..I say vote yes. It’s not great, but it greases the skids by changing the system; once changed, it’s that much easier to change it again — much as the Reform Act 1832, whilst imperfect, led to far greater changes in the electoral system. If AV is rejected, it’ll be touted as public approval of the current system, and it’ll be a generation or more before anyone dares try again.
9:21 AM
Jonathan Hopkin said…Agree with Nomad. If you want PR, voting against this makes it less likely. Remember the sinking of devolution in the 1970s? Took 20 years to get that going again. Nick Clegg is ****ed anyway, AV isn’t going to save him.
11:21 AM
Pauline said…I agree with Nomad as well. Just think of the “told you so” smirking if there’s a no vote. And I can’t bring myself to side with Cameron and bloody Nick Griffin.
The problem here is that every attempt to model its effects I’ve seen primarily benefits the Lib Dems. All other things being equal, this fulfils their primary interest in supporting electoral reform. More proportionality starts to bring other parties into the game. In a transitional AV system, the Lib Dems would be in the position of the German FDP, and they wouldn’t have any interest in weakening this position. They would tend to swing against anyone who suggested STV or more, and as kingmakers, prevent it from happening. If making a move on electoral reform really did make it easier to go further, we’d somehow have to get to AV without having a single swing party with an interest in sticking at AV. Essentially, we’d need to have a Labour government with a manifesto commitment to STV, which requires that the Lib Dems get such a thrashing that even the AV bonus can’t keep them relevant.
Well, I can certainly imagine the Lib Dems getting a thrashing at the next election. But if the point is to beat the coalition and elect a strong Labour government, either on its own or as a hegemonic coalition partner with a few Lib Dem survivors, and then pass STV, why risk the scenario where the Lib Dems just squeak by thanks to AV and put the Tories in again? What benefit does the detour through AV provide? Isn’t it just a more complicated and slightly riskier route to the same goal?
There were those who strongly opposed AV on the grounds that losing the vote would destabilise the coalition and bring a general election closer:
Phil – April 11, 2011 at 10:56 am: Anything that makes the coalition less cohesive is good for us (and for the country), as is anything that stops the Lib Dem leadership from carrying on as if 2010 was politics as usual. Turn it round: the fact that a Yes vote would make Nick Clegg happy wouldn’t be a good enough reason to vote No, but the prospect of a Yes vote consolidating Clegg’s leadership of the Lib Dems and hence stabilising the coalition is quite good enough for me.
Chris Williams – April 11, 2011 at 11:05 am: I’m with Phil on this: vote No to split the Lib Dems and bring down the Coalition ASAP. The next lot in will find it harder to screw up the public sector.
On the other hand:
Tom said…” I’m teetering between the principle of spanking Clegg and the principle of doing anything the Murdoch papers are lying about” Organ grinder or monkey? Yes all the way, baby. 8:18 PM
Some people had technical arguments in favour of AV:
Raphael – April 10, 2011 at 10:14 pm: As far as I can tell, if voters don’t act too stupidly, the main effect of AV in Britain would be that the Tories (or UKIP, or the BNP,) wouldn’t be able anymore to win a constituency where most voters are more or less left of centre or centre-left through a split in the left-leaning vote.
Which, going by past results, might mean that it would become a lot more difficult for the Tories to win a majority in the Commons anytime soon, or even to get as close to an outright majority as they’re now again.
Phil Hunt: April 10, 2011 at 6:47 pm: Another advantage of AV — it makes it easier to get rid of unpopular MPs. I would love to see the look on Clegg’s face if AV wins and the voters of Sheffield Hallam use it to get rid of him.
Anonymous said…STV is fairer. But AV at least prevents you ‘wasting’ your vote by voting for a minor party. And over time minor parties can grow in strength to win an AV seat. Adam Brandt winning the seat of Melbourne for the Greens at the last Federal election being a case in point. 12:50 PM
One reader was strongly in favour of a majoritarian system, which is surprising as he’s a Lib Dem. Another was worried that the Tories would win an early election, to which I can only respond that the UK Polling Report‘s projection based on the current state of the polls forecasts a Labour majority of 86.
In general, it seems to me that the problem is basically whether you consider the Lib Dems to be a credible partner for a left-wing government. If so, then all the stuff about a progressive majority and keeping the Tories out of as many seats as possible retains its force, up to a point. But only up to a point. One thing we know now that we didn’t in May, 2010 is that the Lib Dems are indeed capable of enabling a radical Tory government. For the “anti-Tory AV” model to work, you have to assume that Labour-Lib Dem coalitions will drag the political spectrum far enough to the Left to balance out the inevitable periods of Tory-Lib Dem coalition. That might be true in a STV world where a Labour-led coalition would have to be concerned about its left flank, but it wouldn’t be true in an AV world where, assuming mediocrity, the election would be decided by the Liberals. Of course, the Liberals might be a moderating influence on the Tories, but have we seen that much evidence of this?
And if you don’t believe they can be treated as a reliable factor in the Left’s calculations, well, you just have to consider them to be Tories operationally, more like the Aussies’ National party than the FDP.
In fact, I’m coming around to the view that AV itself sucks. Isn’t it just a way of dignifying swing-voter politics? Rather than hypertargeting five people in the bit of Stevenage with no smelly foreigners, close to the Tesco and just far enough from the motorway, isn’t it just a way of redefining them as the Lib Dem base?
So what about “no, and campaign to get STV on the next Labour manifesto”?
(Someone also dropped off this link, which makes a strong argument against letting Labour become a second preference party.)
(I really am starting to talk like I’m back in again, aren’t I?)
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