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A Senate, If You Can Keep It and Two Amendments on the Senate would be a good read for you if you have not seen it yet.
That is quite the incredible read. Thanks!
I actually quite like the concept of the solution, but he also admits in later posts that it's just not going to work. I'd probably agree that the two biggest problems are even explaining it to people and Goodhart's law on the algo. Still, the conceptualization of the problem and the broad principles guiding our search for a solution are more spot on than most treatments I've seen.
Shame that it's buried in a gigantic cluster of a thread on yet another silly, tragic, scissor shooting. I'd almost just collapsed the whole thread a few times, but I'm glad I managed to catch this. I'm sure I'll be toying with it in my mind for quite a while to come.
Oh sorry I linked to the wrong article, here is Two Amendments on the Senate, where he tries to fix up his amendment so that it does not rely on FORTRAN at least: https://decivitate.jamesjheaney.com/p/two-amendments-on-the-senate @stuckinbathroom so you see it.
Maybe I will write a top level post so everyone sees it. Not really culture war in itself but maybe I can find an angle to give it a personal spin.
Yeah, I read that version of it, and I sort of didn't like it quite as much. He didn't talk much about the feature that I didn't like; he just slipped it in there. That is, that they can nominate anyone in the state who meets the qualifications of being a US Senator. I think this plausibly makes it more vulnerable to party discipline concerns. Part of what made the first proposal interesting was that they were limited to nominating from their own body, and he went to great lengths to note how small these bodies are. Moreover, the punishing algo prevented them from even being able to try to game the nomination phase; you were just 'stuck' with the center (excepting the major concern about algo manipulation that maybe I still hold the faintest of hope of fixing in another way).
Here, I think he's implicitly relying on the partisan pull to nominate multiple candidates (in an attempt to get through the veto stage) to enable a subset of moderate partisans to 'defect' from the party and nominate someone more centrist. I think the key maneuver he's relying on here is the secret ballot nomination, but that only enables defection; sufficient party solidarity may prevail. If they're only limited to nominating from the 10-30 sitting state Senators of their party, I could see how they're likely to end up with some amount of more moderate nominees. But in this second case, the party can select from anyone. So they make a list. They pick this list to be all people that they think are as close to exactly at the median position of their party's caucus as possible. They assign which senators are to nominate which nominee, allowing them partial visibility 'through the secret ballot' (if somebody steps out of line, you have it narrowed down to <5 people). Sure, the minority party can veto some subset of these "identical in all but name" nominees, but without completely confirming the math, I think sufficient party discipline should get one of them through the final ballot.
Possibly, yes, the minority party could nominate some folks who are centrist enough to try to break the majority party's discipline, but I see this as a major weakness that was not present in the version where you had an algo that could plausibly identify the punishing middle from within the body, itself. If there's any way to further harden the algo approach, I would significantly prefer it.
Also, yes, I would like to encourage a top-level post. Would love more visibility for this stuff!
I think the key maneuver is actually the veto ability combined with the Condorcet method. Condorcet by itself selects for moderate candidates.
I do like the idea of limiting candidates to other members of the body that is electing the State's Senator. I wonder if that was just an oversight to exclude that requirement here.
Sorry if I wasn't entirely clear; I'm concerned about the nomination part of the contingent election, which is pre-veto and pre-Condorcet. For nomination, you only need 1/10th support. So, what I'm thinking is that one party controls >= 50% of the state Senate, so they pick >= 5 names (from their general party pool), all of which are ideologically approximately the median of their own party's position. Yes, the minority can come together and pick some of their own, too. So you'll have five or more essentially identical majority party candidates and four or fewer minority party candidates (ideologically arranged however they so please).
Then comes veto, and the minority party can't pick off any more of the majority's nominees as the majority can pick off of the minority's nominees.
Then comes the counting of the votes via Condorcet (yes, this is on the same ballot as the vetos, but I'm not sure it matters if we assume sufficient party solidarity). I think that the majority can ensure that at least one of their (slightly longer than the minority's) list of essentially identical party candidates gets through.
The vetos/Condorcet can definitely moderate if the party actually has to choose five individuals that are from a small, finite set that still possesses a significant spectrum of ideologies. If you've only got thirty folks in your party in the Senate, it may be difficult to cluster them all right at your party's median, especially if there are other reasons (ineligibility, perceived lack of being 'ready', etc.) that might prevent tight bunching.
The vetos/Condorcet can be very effective if you actually think you can get defection in any of the three stages from any of the more moderate members of the majority party. But if they can clearly tell their moderates, "You're getting someone who's not too bad, doesn't really matter who, just the median of our own party's ideology (which is kind of what we, as a public, are already getting), and if you defect, we're probably getting one of their guys (oh, and we'll probably be able to figure out that it was one of you 3-5 who defected)," then I'm not sure we're likely to get that moderate defection at any point.
I'll note that his footnote 33, going through example contingent elections treats every example as though the nominations are still coming directly from the state Senate, itself, in this version, too. This small set and assuming factions rather than party discipline results in examples like:
I agree that it may have just been an oversight, but the reason why I think it's actually important to correct that oversight is that I think the majority essentially nominates #12, #12, #12, and #12, just with four different names coming from their more general party pool (ok, in his exact example, they pick #9 by name, then three nameless #12's). Even here, picking only within the state Senate, with strict party discipline (and sufficient eligibility, both legally and for other party sensibilities), they could manage something like #9, #11, #12, and #13, and we probably don't get nearly the same moderating effect.
Mayyyyybe you'll actually get more defections than I think, and there would be at least a different space of maneuvering involved, but this version lacks the sort of serious punishment that the first version had of, "If you go to the contingent election, #12 is sooooo far off the table, because the very punishing algo (if you can keep it) is only giving you #18-22 as options. As an aside, if anything, that algo may be too punishing to the majority party; if the minority knows that #18 is their worst option in the contingent election (and they're able to prevent a 2/3rds in the main one), then they may plausibly choose to just force a contingent election every time. It would definitely give more moderate US Senators, but there may be knock-on effects, even more incentive to figure out how to game the algo, etc.
It would probably be best to do several iterations of a mock election using this method before actually putting it in an amendment. I would be curious to see how it goes.
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Protip: The best way to browse this website is through the "firehose" all-comments page.
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I had not seen them; thank you for the fascinating lunch break reading!
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