Gerrymandering distorts the will of the people, but the basic math of geographic representation makes it difficult to get rid of, unless we get rid of representation for geographic districts.
So the conclusion seems to be that smaller districts more responsive but increasing the number of districts would require increasing the number of representatives, which can be harder in larger countries. What would happen if we were to assign seats based on the total percentile average for each district (for example if there were 6 districts with 100 people each and the blues won three of them with 60 votes and lost the other three with 40 votes which would give them 50 seats in an 100 seat senate?)
This is a pretty example where everything works out nicely:
"for example if there were 6 districts with 100 people each and the blues won three of them with 60 votes and lost the other three with 40 votes "
There are many cases where almost any voting system will work out just fine. Everyone agrees that "first past the post" is a terrible system, and yet if one candidate gets 80% of the vote, and therefore is elected, we can all agree that the system worked out just fine. Almost every system of voting (even the worst systems of voting) have circumstances where they work just fine.
But about the example you give, it sounds like you're actually talking about proportional representation at the top level of the system, in which case, in your system the districts are basically meaningless?
88, 76, 69, 51, 42, 31 = 59.5% average
So, how many representatives do they get? They've won in 4 districts. If they get 4 representatives, out of 6, then then they get 66.6% representation, in which case, once again, there is a gap between their representation versus the percent of the vote that they got. But if you mean that they should get 59.5% of the legislature, then you are talking about a proportional system, without any districts at all.
The extreme case with the district system would look like:
51, 51, 51, 51, 10, 10 = 37% of the vote, but they win 66.6% of the districts.
In other words, if a party can win a whole district, then the gap between their average vote and their eventual representation in the legislature can be quite large. But if you mean that in this case they would only get 37% of the legislature, then the districts don't matter at all, and you're talking about a proportional system, like what they have in Israel.
You might want to take a look at STV (Single Transferable Vote), which is a way of getting closer to proportional representation without having a party list system. It's a form of Ranked Choice Voting that elects multiple winners in a single election.
The more representatives per district, the closer to proportional representation you can get, but you can still have geographical districts, which is a good thing because there are regional concerns and interests in politics. So there is a tradeoff between locality of representation and granularity of proportional representation. Multiple representatives per district, elected with a proportional system such as STV, makes gerrymandering very difficult if not impossible.
Approval voting is problematic because it violates one-person-one-vote, it violates later-no-harm, and may also be subject to manipulation by organized groups.
Thank you for your suggestion. All voting systems have strengths and weaknesses. The weaknesses of First Past The Post are significant, therefore we should get rid of it. Any of the other systems are probably equally good, as a practical matter, because the system of voting is only one of many problems that need to be addressed in our current democratic systems, so once we move beyond FPTP then we face diminishing returns, in terms of how much of an improvement we can expect from other systems of voting. So it probably doesn't matter if we use approval voting or STV or score voting -- all of them would be an improvement to FPTP, and the differences between them would be small relative to other problems that still need to be fixed.
Having said that, here are some good arguments for approval voting:
So 7% becomes 20%, which is a large rounding error, but such a rounding error would be natural in any system uses small geographic units, so this isn't an argument against STV, but it remains an argument against geographic districts. As my essay said, any boundaries drawn on a map will put distance between what voters really want and what the outcome of the election is. Therefore, as I said, it is best to get rid of all geographic subdivisions and let the whole public vote for the whole legislature.
If we choose an "improvement" that has too many bad properties, that is going to turn off a lot of voters. I'm afraid that's what seems most likely with approval voting.
I disagree that there should be no geographical districts. Geographic locality is one aspect among many that links people. Like I said, there's a tradeoff between fineness of proportional representation and locality. If the grain size is too coarse, we need larger districts, or more representatives per district, or both. I agree there's always going to be some rounding error but it can be minimized to the point it is nearly meaningless. In any case I really don't think completely at large voting would be terribly popular especially on a national level.
As to geographic districts, at this point all I can do is repeat what I said in the essay:
Your town assembly can still take care of the concerns of your town.
Your regional assembly can still take care of the concerns of your region.
Your National Assembly can still take care of the concerns of your nation.
We can get rid of gerrymandering and still have different levels of government, each devoted to a particular level of localism. You can still have an elected person who is responsible for your local concerns. But there is no reason to have one level of localism interfere with the affairs of a different level of localism.
The dilemma here looks like one that is based on some unstated assumptions on what kind of voting systems are allowed. With a bit of creativity the dilemma can be broken. For example:
1) The *number* of seats (N) each party gets is based on the popular vote.
2) Each party then gets the N districts where they did best.
So in the Katechon example, 60% of the people vote blue, so blue gets 6 out of the 10 seats. 40% votes violet so violet gets 4 seats. Then we rank all the districts in order from most blue-leaning to most violet-leaning, and the blues win the 6 most blue leaning districts, while the violets win the 4 most violet leaning districts.
So there we have full representation of ideas and still a good representation of land. With a pure two party system this works very straight forward, in a multi party system deciding which party gets which district becomes more tricky, but any solution still achieves fine grained representation of both ideas and land.
There are also many variants of hybrid systems that achieve fine grained representation of ideas and districts without blowing up the size of the parliament. Wikipedia describes them under "mixed electoral systems", so I won't quote them here.
Such systems don't solve the impossibility theorem but they do get rid of the incentive for gerrymandering, as a party can't increase their total share of seats by changing the districts.
There's also the assumption that the elected representatives are equal. But what if they're not?
What if their voting power would be proportional to the amount of votes they get? Sure, put all your blues in one district. You now get a super-representative who laughs at the violet representatives. Don't like that? Then draw your districts more proportionally.
(Also in case there's an opinion shift, that eats at the representative's voting power).
Let's assume 10 districts with 100,000 people each. In a district with 100,000 blues, the blue representative gets 100,000 votes and then a weight of 100,000 when in the legislature. A district with 51,000 violets, the violet representative gets 51,000 votes and then a weight of 51,000 in the legislature.
In the opening sceneario of the essay, the violets had the power to draw the district lines and they did:
4 districts hold 400,000 blues
6 districts hold 33,333 blues and 66,666 violets.
So after the election the violets have 6 representatives with a total weight of 400,000 and the blues have 4 representatives with a total weight of 400,000.
So the violets only get 40% of the vote, but they end up with 50% of the weight in the legislature.
So there is still some distortion, in a 2 party scenario. And the distortion gets much worse in a 3 party scenario.
I didn't interpret what Lasse was saying in the same way you did.
I interpreted it as saying that each of the ten districts would have blue representative AND a violet representative, with the weights being proportional to their vote counts.
In the 4 districts where the blues received 100,000 votes and the violets received zero, the blue representative for that district would have a weight of 100,000 while the violet representative for that district would have a weight of zero. To be fair, the representative wouldn't even bother showing up, would they.
In each of the other six districts, the violet representative for each district would have weight of 66, 666, while the blue representative for each district would have a weight of 33,333.
So, the violets with 40% of the national votes would have 40% of the national weight. And they would have the appropriate weight in each district as well. Same goes for the blues.
While that solves many of the distribution problems with gerrymandering, it does mean that the size of the legislature is now variable and changes every time someone starts a new political party. With 10 districts and 2 parties we start with a legislature that has 20 people in it. Then someone starts a new party and the legislature grows to 30. Now someone starts a local party that is only active in one district, so the legislature grows to 31, 10 more parties start, the legislature is now 131, then one party fails to get any votes at all and the legislature shrinks to 121. In this simple example, the problem seems annoying but not terrible.
In the real world, in a country such as the USA, which has 435 House districts, 10 parties would mean the legislature now has 4,350 people in it. That is very large.
So, what is the goal? Something like MMP or STV or simple approval voting can also give roughly accurate results, with only minor distortions, without bloating the size of the legislature.
What do you see as the unique advantage of the approach suggested by Lasse?
I think the idea most "normal" people have of how districts should be drawn is very different to any suggestions here. When I explained MPs to my 6 year old daughter, what I said is: every town in the UK picks someone to send to parliament.
It's actually hilariously more complicated than that, but isn't that in fact the implicit model that the public have? Boundaries are drawn around existing communities, like towns. They include all types of people and voters in whatever proportions that that town happens to have.
I get that this approach is under-specified (what is a community anyway?), and can be very arbitrary (but sometimes not - towns are often quite clearly demarcated!), but that's kind of the point....
We agree that trying to draw districts to allocate votes is impossible to make fair, so don't we need an outside view like this that allocates not based on the fairness of votes but on existing real-world community borders? That it's clearly impossible to formalize might be a point in its favour, make this sort of thing too legible and it just becomes an optimization game for interested parties.
I'd be interested to see more thinking on how we could make this implicit model the public imagines more rigorous and explicit.
You COULD make districts bigger (i.e., instead of 10 districts with a single representative each, have 3 districts with 4 each). Having multi-seat districts creates "mini-PR" systems (well, sort of, and under certain systems -- some systems make it worse), that limit how unfairly votes can be expressed within a district. So you still get regional representations, but your regions are larger, and more of your voters get their vote to matter.
You can easily get rid of gerrymandering simply by proscribing an algorithmic process for districting.
For example: Allow local areas to define precincts (one for each voting place). Then conduct a census. Then define the districts to be the most compact aggregations of precincts that have a population variation of less than 2%. Choose the definition of compactness in advance.
There are obvious optional adjustments for anything you could care about. Precisely define the formula for determining goodness before the census, and use small precincts, and gerrymandering becomes impossible.
This doesn't guarantee any sort of fairness (which as you point out can't really be guaranteed). But it does provide independence from political manipulation.
"You can easily get rid of gerrymandering simply by proscribing an algorithmic process for districting."
There were several people who said this, here and on Reddit and on Hacker News. I believe you are defining gerrymandering as a deliberate and intentional act? By contrast, I was using the word "gerrymandering" to refer to the fact that the geographic boundary will establish a gap between the will of the voters and the final result of voting. So even if an algorithmic process is followed, and the damage done is accidental and unintentional, I am still referring to that as "gerrymandering."
That isn't how the term is used in politics. And in math we have a variety of more precise terms for the various forms of misrepresentation.
If the goal is to get rid of misrepresentation, there is still an obvious solution: don't use representatives at all. Use a form of direct democracy. Its 2022. We don't need to have a bunch of people meet in the same place. We can use proxies to reduce the burden on average citizens in a way that has none of the limitations of electing a representative.
While Arrow's theorem still applies when there are more than two options, its practical significance becomes negligible because when issues are handled separately (electing representatives has the effect of lumping issues together).
(And any way, there are more significant issues having to do with the tradeoff between individual and collective rights that become the dominant concern once you get to this point [if they aren't already]).
Have you tried this? All through my teens and 20s I was part of collectives that tried to manage themselves using direct democracy. Even with just 100 people involved, we found it impossible to be pure about this. Some people had affinities for some activities -- gardening, paying bills, cutting wood, taking out the trash, buying food, buying construction materials, buying soil, buying seeds, etc. Over and over again, we found the only thing that worked was appointing our specialists and then trusting them to make decisions for all of us. Those communities that insisted that all decisions eventually be voted on soon fell apart. And that's with 100 people acting in good faith. Please read this and then maybe read the book, it is very good:
Any society that attempts direct democracy will pass through a brief era of chaos and then resolve itself into an authoritarian dictatorship. Even if we set aside the emotional factors (which loom large in real life) there are the practical issues: direct democracy doesn't have enough checks and balances to ensure the rights of minorities, nor does it have enough checks and balances to resist dictatorship. You can see this in groups as small as a 100, and of course things get worse at larger scale.
BTW, using direct democracy does not imply the absence of individual rights, nor does it imply majority rules. These are orthogonal questions. A representative legislature with majority rules and no individual rights also becomes a dictatorship immediately.
A representative democracy will have political parties, and research suggests that political parties are one of the major deterrents to dictatorship. Consider the Panama Exception:
This is easily resolved with proxies. Allow everyone to choose their own "specialist". Whenever they don't vote, their proxy's vote is used. Proxies can daisy chain.
You can make decisions ad hoc with proxies organizing however they wish, or have a formal debating chamber in which the number of proxies held factors into rules governing who speaks how long.
But however you do this there is none of the unfair representation problem of elected representatives because 100% of votes are cast by a person that the original vote holder wants casting their vote.
Most people lack the skill to hire. Hiring is itself a skill that takes many years to learn. Especially difficult is to hire in areas where you yourself have no skill.
I know, that's why I wrote the essay. Most people are under the mistaken impression that there is a way to draw lines on the map that is "fair" and therefore "not gerrymandered." I wrote the essay so that more people will understand that all districts are gerrymandered, regardless of the intention of those who are drawing the maps.
I think you're too dismissive of the idea of making legislative bodies much, much bigger. What exactly is it about a several-thousand-person house of representatives that couldn't work? There are many people out there who think this is the simplest way to make a significant improvement to the problem of unequal representation; I don't have a specific favored place to link to, but a quick search will turn up many articles supporting the idea from major publications.
It's impossible to address every idea in every essay, especially since people generally won't read an essay on the Web if it is longer than 3,000 or 4,000 words. But a much larger intermediate assembly was discussed here:
I used to think that this was a magic bullet, but then I realized that if you look at state legislatures - which generally have a lot more representatives than the state does in Congress - these are also wildly gerrymandered.
Look at Wisconsin, which is acknowledged as gerrymandered at the state level. They voted almost split for president, but have an 6-2 R/D legislature. They also have a state assembly made of 99 representatives. It is currently 61 R, 38 D.
So if we expanded Wisconsin's Congressional representatives from 8 to 99, it would merely shift from 75/25 R/D to 61/38 R/D. Not 50/50.
So the conclusion seems to be that smaller districts more responsive but increasing the number of districts would require increasing the number of representatives, which can be harder in larger countries. What would happen if we were to assign seats based on the total percentile average for each district (for example if there were 6 districts with 100 people each and the blues won three of them with 60 votes and lost the other three with 40 votes which would give them 50 seats in an 100 seat senate?)
I'm not clear what you are saying.
This is a pretty example where everything works out nicely:
"for example if there were 6 districts with 100 people each and the blues won three of them with 60 votes and lost the other three with 40 votes "
There are many cases where almost any voting system will work out just fine. Everyone agrees that "first past the post" is a terrible system, and yet if one candidate gets 80% of the vote, and therefore is elected, we can all agree that the system worked out just fine. Almost every system of voting (even the worst systems of voting) have circumstances where they work just fine.
But about the example you give, it sounds like you're actually talking about proportional representation at the top level of the system, in which case, in your system the districts are basically meaningless?
88, 76, 69, 51, 42, 31 = 59.5% average
So, how many representatives do they get? They've won in 4 districts. If they get 4 representatives, out of 6, then then they get 66.6% representation, in which case, once again, there is a gap between their representation versus the percent of the vote that they got. But if you mean that they should get 59.5% of the legislature, then you are talking about a proportional system, without any districts at all.
The extreme case with the district system would look like:
51, 51, 51, 51, 10, 10 = 37% of the vote, but they win 66.6% of the districts.
In other words, if a party can win a whole district, then the gap between their average vote and their eventual representation in the legislature can be quite large. But if you mean that in this case they would only get 37% of the legislature, then the districts don't matter at all, and you're talking about a proportional system, like what they have in Israel.
You might want to take a look at STV (Single Transferable Vote), which is a way of getting closer to proportional representation without having a party list system. It's a form of Ranked Choice Voting that elects multiple winners in a single election.
The more representatives per district, the closer to proportional representation you can get, but you can still have geographical districts, which is a good thing because there are regional concerns and interests in politics. So there is a tradeoff between locality of representation and granularity of proportional representation. Multiple representatives per district, elected with a proportional system such as STV, makes gerrymandering very difficult if not impossible.
Approval voting is problematic because it violates one-person-one-vote, it violates later-no-harm, and may also be subject to manipulation by organized groups.
Thank you for your suggestion. All voting systems have strengths and weaknesses. The weaknesses of First Past The Post are significant, therefore we should get rid of it. Any of the other systems are probably equally good, as a practical matter, because the system of voting is only one of many problems that need to be addressed in our current democratic systems, so once we move beyond FPTP then we face diminishing returns, in terms of how much of an improvement we can expect from other systems of voting. So it probably doesn't matter if we use approval voting or STV or score voting -- all of them would be an improvement to FPTP, and the differences between them would be small relative to other problems that still need to be fixed.
Having said that, here are some good arguments for approval voting:
https://electionscience.org/voting-methods/ten-critiques-and-defenses-on-approval-voting/
Here is a better argument for approval voting:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/should-the-votes-from-voters-combine?s=w
Wikipedia offers an example of STV on this page:
They give this example:
Party A. 48%
Party B. 45%
Independent 7%
Which gives this representation:
40%
40%
20%
So 7% becomes 20%, which is a large rounding error, but such a rounding error would be natural in any system uses small geographic units, so this isn't an argument against STV, but it remains an argument against geographic districts. As my essay said, any boundaries drawn on a map will put distance between what voters really want and what the outcome of the election is. Therefore, as I said, it is best to get rid of all geographic subdivisions and let the whole public vote for the whole legislature.
If we choose an "improvement" that has too many bad properties, that is going to turn off a lot of voters. I'm afraid that's what seems most likely with approval voting.
I disagree that there should be no geographical districts. Geographic locality is one aspect among many that links people. Like I said, there's a tradeoff between fineness of proportional representation and locality. If the grain size is too coarse, we need larger districts, or more representatives per district, or both. I agree there's always going to be some rounding error but it can be minimized to the point it is nearly meaningless. In any case I really don't think completely at large voting would be terribly popular especially on a national level.
I offer an argument for approval voting here:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/should-the-votes-from-voters-combine?s=w
As to geographic districts, at this point all I can do is repeat what I said in the essay:
Your town assembly can still take care of the concerns of your town.
Your regional assembly can still take care of the concerns of your region.
Your National Assembly can still take care of the concerns of your nation.
We can get rid of gerrymandering and still have different levels of government, each devoted to a particular level of localism. You can still have an elected person who is responsible for your local concerns. But there is no reason to have one level of localism interfere with the affairs of a different level of localism.
The dilemma here looks like one that is based on some unstated assumptions on what kind of voting systems are allowed. With a bit of creativity the dilemma can be broken. For example:
1) The *number* of seats (N) each party gets is based on the popular vote.
2) Each party then gets the N districts where they did best.
So in the Katechon example, 60% of the people vote blue, so blue gets 6 out of the 10 seats. 40% votes violet so violet gets 4 seats. Then we rank all the districts in order from most blue-leaning to most violet-leaning, and the blues win the 6 most blue leaning districts, while the violets win the 4 most violet leaning districts.
So there we have full representation of ideas and still a good representation of land. With a pure two party system this works very straight forward, in a multi party system deciding which party gets which district becomes more tricky, but any solution still achieves fine grained representation of both ideas and land.
There are also many variants of hybrid systems that achieve fine grained representation of ideas and districts without blowing up the size of the parliament. Wikipedia describes them under "mixed electoral systems", so I won't quote them here.
Such systems don't solve the impossibility theorem but they do get rid of the incentive for gerrymandering, as a party can't increase their total share of seats by changing the districts.
There's also the assumption that the elected representatives are equal. But what if they're not?
What if their voting power would be proportional to the amount of votes they get? Sure, put all your blues in one district. You now get a super-representative who laughs at the violet representatives. Don't like that? Then draw your districts more proportionally.
(Also in case there's an opinion shift, that eats at the representative's voting power).
Let's do the math and see what we get.
Let's assume 10 districts with 100,000 people each. In a district with 100,000 blues, the blue representative gets 100,000 votes and then a weight of 100,000 when in the legislature. A district with 51,000 violets, the violet representative gets 51,000 votes and then a weight of 51,000 in the legislature.
In the opening sceneario of the essay, the violets had the power to draw the district lines and they did:
4 districts hold 400,000 blues
6 districts hold 33,333 blues and 66,666 violets.
So after the election the violets have 6 representatives with a total weight of 400,000 and the blues have 4 representatives with a total weight of 400,000.
So the violets only get 40% of the vote, but they end up with 50% of the weight in the legislature.
So there is still some distortion, in a 2 party scenario. And the distortion gets much worse in a 3 party scenario.
I didn't interpret what Lasse was saying in the same way you did.
I interpreted it as saying that each of the ten districts would have blue representative AND a violet representative, with the weights being proportional to their vote counts.
In the 4 districts where the blues received 100,000 votes and the violets received zero, the blue representative for that district would have a weight of 100,000 while the violet representative for that district would have a weight of zero. To be fair, the representative wouldn't even bother showing up, would they.
In each of the other six districts, the violet representative for each district would have weight of 66, 666, while the blue representative for each district would have a weight of 33,333.
So, the violets with 40% of the national votes would have 40% of the national weight. And they would have the appropriate weight in each district as well. Same goes for the blues.
While that solves many of the distribution problems with gerrymandering, it does mean that the size of the legislature is now variable and changes every time someone starts a new political party. With 10 districts and 2 parties we start with a legislature that has 20 people in it. Then someone starts a new party and the legislature grows to 30. Now someone starts a local party that is only active in one district, so the legislature grows to 31, 10 more parties start, the legislature is now 131, then one party fails to get any votes at all and the legislature shrinks to 121. In this simple example, the problem seems annoying but not terrible.
In the real world, in a country such as the USA, which has 435 House districts, 10 parties would mean the legislature now has 4,350 people in it. That is very large.
So, what is the goal? Something like MMP or STV or simple approval voting can also give roughly accurate results, with only minor distortions, without bloating the size of the legislature.
What do you see as the unique advantage of the approach suggested by Lasse?
GREAT discussion - going to stick with me.
I think the idea most "normal" people have of how districts should be drawn is very different to any suggestions here. When I explained MPs to my 6 year old daughter, what I said is: every town in the UK picks someone to send to parliament.
It's actually hilariously more complicated than that, but isn't that in fact the implicit model that the public have? Boundaries are drawn around existing communities, like towns. They include all types of people and voters in whatever proportions that that town happens to have.
I get that this approach is under-specified (what is a community anyway?), and can be very arbitrary (but sometimes not - towns are often quite clearly demarcated!), but that's kind of the point....
We agree that trying to draw districts to allocate votes is impossible to make fair, so don't we need an outside view like this that allocates not based on the fairness of votes but on existing real-world community borders? That it's clearly impossible to formalize might be a point in its favour, make this sort of thing too legible and it just becomes an optimization game for interested parties.
I'd be interested to see more thinking on how we could make this implicit model the public imagines more rigorous and explicit.
You COULD make districts bigger (i.e., instead of 10 districts with a single representative each, have 3 districts with 4 each). Having multi-seat districts creates "mini-PR" systems (well, sort of, and under certain systems -- some systems make it worse), that limit how unfairly votes can be expressed within a district. So you still get regional representations, but your regions are larger, and more of your voters get their vote to matter.
You can easily get rid of gerrymandering simply by proscribing an algorithmic process for districting.
For example: Allow local areas to define precincts (one for each voting place). Then conduct a census. Then define the districts to be the most compact aggregations of precincts that have a population variation of less than 2%. Choose the definition of compactness in advance.
There are obvious optional adjustments for anything you could care about. Precisely define the formula for determining goodness before the census, and use small precincts, and gerrymandering becomes impossible.
This doesn't guarantee any sort of fairness (which as you point out can't really be guaranteed). But it does provide independence from political manipulation.
"You can easily get rid of gerrymandering simply by proscribing an algorithmic process for districting."
There were several people who said this, here and on Reddit and on Hacker News. I believe you are defining gerrymandering as a deliberate and intentional act? By contrast, I was using the word "gerrymandering" to refer to the fact that the geographic boundary will establish a gap between the will of the voters and the final result of voting. So even if an algorithmic process is followed, and the damage done is accidental and unintentional, I am still referring to that as "gerrymandering."
That isn't how the term is used in politics. And in math we have a variety of more precise terms for the various forms of misrepresentation.
If the goal is to get rid of misrepresentation, there is still an obvious solution: don't use representatives at all. Use a form of direct democracy. Its 2022. We don't need to have a bunch of people meet in the same place. We can use proxies to reduce the burden on average citizens in a way that has none of the limitations of electing a representative.
While Arrow's theorem still applies when there are more than two options, its practical significance becomes negligible because when issues are handled separately (electing representatives has the effect of lumping issues together).
(And any way, there are more significant issues having to do with the tradeoff between individual and collective rights that become the dominant concern once you get to this point [if they aren't already]).
"Use a form of direct democracy."
Have you tried this? All through my teens and 20s I was part of collectives that tried to manage themselves using direct democracy. Even with just 100 people involved, we found it impossible to be pure about this. Some people had affinities for some activities -- gardening, paying bills, cutting wood, taking out the trash, buying food, buying construction materials, buying soil, buying seeds, etc. Over and over again, we found the only thing that worked was appointing our specialists and then trusting them to make decisions for all of us. Those communities that insisted that all decisions eventually be voted on soon fell apart. And that's with 100 people acting in good faith. Please read this and then maybe read the book, it is very good:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/creating-a-life-together-practical?s=w
Any society that attempts direct democracy will pass through a brief era of chaos and then resolve itself into an authoritarian dictatorship. Even if we set aside the emotional factors (which loom large in real life) there are the practical issues: direct democracy doesn't have enough checks and balances to ensure the rights of minorities, nor does it have enough checks and balances to resist dictatorship. You can see this in groups as small as a 100, and of course things get worse at larger scale.
BTW, using direct democracy does not imply the absence of individual rights, nor does it imply majority rules. These are orthogonal questions. A representative legislature with majority rules and no individual rights also becomes a dictatorship immediately.
A representative democracy will have political parties, and research suggests that political parties are one of the major deterrents to dictatorship. Consider the Panama Exception:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/the-panama-exception?s=w
And political parties seem to play a key role in educating voters:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part-16-of?s=w
And, when given a chance to vote directly, voters often vote against their own interests:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part-12-of?s=w
Political parties contribute to negatively to political systems all the time.
In the US voting against interest is especially prevalent, and not obviously a bad thing.
Given the absence of a system like what I'm suggesting, Its hard to imagine that the research is on point.
This is easily resolved with proxies. Allow everyone to choose their own "specialist". Whenever they don't vote, their proxy's vote is used. Proxies can daisy chain.
You can make decisions ad hoc with proxies organizing however they wish, or have a formal debating chamber in which the number of proxies held factors into rules governing who speaks how long.
But however you do this there is none of the unfair representation problem of elected representatives because 100% of votes are cast by a person that the original vote holder wants casting their vote.
"Allow everyone to choose their own "specialist".
This goes back to the issue of "How to hire" which I wrote about here:
https://www.amazon.com/meetings-underrated-Group-waste-time-ebook/dp/B09SFRNJKS/
Most people lack the skill to hire. Hiring is itself a skill that takes many years to learn. Especially difficult is to hire in areas where you yourself have no skill.
Most people have people close to them that they trust. Hiring is about finding people you don't know well to trust. It's much harder.
"That isn't how the term is used in politics"
I know, that's why I wrote the essay. Most people are under the mistaken impression that there is a way to draw lines on the map that is "fair" and therefore "not gerrymandered." I wrote the essay so that more people will understand that all districts are gerrymandered, regardless of the intention of those who are drawing the maps.
I think you're too dismissive of the idea of making legislative bodies much, much bigger. What exactly is it about a several-thousand-person house of representatives that couldn't work? There are many people out there who think this is the simplest way to make a significant improvement to the problem of unequal representation; I don't have a specific favored place to link to, but a quick search will turn up many articles supporting the idea from major publications.
A dramatic simplification of procedures in the assembly, so as to allow a much larger and distributed assembly, was discussed here:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part-10-of?s=w
It's impossible to address every idea in every essay, especially since people generally won't read an essay on the Web if it is longer than 3,000 or 4,000 words. But a much larger intermediate assembly was discussed here:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/how-to-fix-democracy-empower-the?s=w
I used to think that this was a magic bullet, but then I realized that if you look at state legislatures - which generally have a lot more representatives than the state does in Congress - these are also wildly gerrymandered.
Look at Wisconsin, which is acknowledged as gerrymandered at the state level. They voted almost split for president, but have an 6-2 R/D legislature. They also have a state assembly made of 99 representatives. It is currently 61 R, 38 D.
So if we expanded Wisconsin's Congressional representatives from 8 to 99, it would merely shift from 75/25 R/D to 61/38 R/D. Not 50/50.
Definitely look into Score Voting where each candidate gets a score much like in the Olympics. Highest average wins. Much. better. results.
I am working on an agent based software simulation that will allow everyone to play around with these different ideas.
I'd love to see different ballot ideas incorporated into Twitter polls -- reach a lot of people educationally.
Have you seen this one? https://ncase.me/ballot/
Thank you, I'll do my best to incorporate that.
The answer to your question is New Zealand...