From: Anton Sherwood (dasher@netcom.com)
Date: Mon Aug 11 1997 - 00:17:18 MDT
Eliezer writes
: >Switch the legislative branch to an at-large system. This amounts
: >to setting up a 121 (1-to-1 correspondence) between voter and
: >congressbeing.
John Clark writes
: Everybody can't vote for 500 people so somebody would have to decide what
: citizen gets to vote for what congress critter, and this is a huge area for
: potential monkey business.
What about proxies (as in _The Probability Broach_)?
What about the Hare (single transferable vote) method?
: >I should also note that having members-at-large may also fix the
: >problem where the congress beings spend all their time trying to
: >get reelected.
:
: Why would that change anything? If a politician doesn't devote full time
: to winning the next election there will certainly be somebody else who will
: and toss him out of office as a result.
When politicians are seen as interchangeable, selected only for ability
to bring home the pork, I suspect you're right: the permanent campaign
is inevitable. But if they're decoupled from districts, they can
represent ideological factions; such representatives, I suspect, would
have less competition for their "market segment".
: The Constitution lasted a long time not because of its perfection but
: because an infrastructure was already in place for it to thrive.
Interesting!
Anton Sherwood *\\* +1 415 267 0685 *\\* DASher@netcom.com
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