Thursday, August 23, 2012

[lchtkklz] Penalizing party line voting

If many votes in a legislature are going straight down party lines, consider it a symptom that something is wrong: let all of them become ineligible for reelection.

Party line votes suggest political parties more intent on gaining power than legislators interested in doing what is best for their country, state, etc.  What is best should be nearly unanimous.

However, such a trigger will probably induce perverse behavior.  What will go wrong?

A lot of politics is simply about defining or moving a property line for which no line is necessarily better than another; it just decides who compensates whom. Bargaining power for such issues naturally leads to factions.

Computational problem: discover political parties even if they are kept secret.  Clustering and Expectation-Maximization.

The inspiration was the story behind indirect election of senators, which was repealed because political infighting within state legislatures kept seats vacant.  If that happens, replace the entire state legislature.

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