Comment by lmkg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lmkg | Hacker News Reader

At least part of the problem is structural. One contributing factor could be that the US uses direct regional elections, instead of a parliamentary system.

In a parliamentary system, the people vote on a party, rather than a person, and the party decides the individuals who get elected. There's less of an emphasis on individual charisma, and charismatic leaders only need appear at the top of the ticket. A party with sufficient representation is free to fill out the bottom of its ticket with "specialists" whose expertise is valuable, but who wouldn't win a general election on their own.

Meanwhile in the states, every ticket is one member deep so there are no specialists, only generalists. While they can be advisors, the only official positions they can take are cabinet members (where we do see lots of scientific degrees). Further, the lack of scientists in low-ranking elected positions (like House of Representatives) means that there's less of a science+politics talent pool to draw from for the high-ranked positions (Executive branch).

The US is supposed to be a representative republic. I suppose this is mostly theoretical, but we shouldn't be voting for Pepsi vs Coke, we should be voting for an individual to serve in our region as representative.

In direct response to the original post, Congress was not designed to invent a nation over and over again, it was designed to be a representation of regions. So scientists should represent regions where science is a major industry.

That pushes the issue back into the older question, given a nation's worth of people, what type of dividing lines best group them into sub-populations for the purpose of representation. That is, why lines in space vs lines in income, or total wealth, or hair color, or profession? And what defense of lines in space could possibly defend such complex (gerrymandered) ones?

>In a parliamentary system, the people vote on a party, rather than a person, and the party decides the individuals who get elected

Are you sure "parliamentary system" is appropriate here?

The UK has a parliamentary system[0] - and we vote for MPs, not parties, despite some people trying to change that.

[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_system

A parliamentary system is one in which the executive and legislative branches are one (EG if the president was a member of congress, and chosen by congress).

@lmkg seems to be referring to a proportional electoral system, not parliamentary http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation

As to the implication that proportional systems don't result in individuals representing constituencies or geographic regions, there are numerous hybrid systems that manage to achieve the best of both worlds http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_transferable_vote

In Australia people vote for individual members, but most do so based on party affiliation. The members available to vote for are chosen by the parties. Candidates seem to be chosen more based on factional loyalty than on expertise; unless someone's on the front bench they don't do anything but provide a vote. This leads to Australia having relatively more career politicians in parliament than the US does.

Keeping in mind that although we vote for individual MPs (although as you point out, mostly based on party affiliation), the party itself chooses for the Prime Minister.

When our previous PM got ousted mid-term, I noticed that lots of people were shocked that a party is allowed to do that to an "elected" PM (when of course, we don't elect the PM, we just elect MPs). Another lot of people pointed out that it is perfectly legitimate, because we effectively vote for the party (by voting for their MPs) and it is their choice as to who runs the country.

I was in a middle ground. Sure, we don't elect the PM directly, but the way the party leaders campaign (and the way their colleagues talk about their leaders), you would think that we had a presidential-style campaign each election cycle. Especially with the 2007 election, where the leaders name was used in the main campaign slogan. So I can forgive the people who didn't realise that we don't actually choose our Prime Minister, because it sure feels like it during the election campaigns.

During the next election, keep an eye out to see how much of a Leader-vs-Leader competition it becomes, in addition to just Party-vs-Party.

(You mean proportional system, not parliamentary system.)

But first-past-the-post with single member districts means that everyone elected has to be, personally, a good election campaigner. And scientists, by and large, make terrible campaigners. They think that being right about an issue is enough to win the point, which is more or less true in science, but absolutely not at all true in politics.

I'm actually not aware of any systems where they vote for a party. Could you give specific examples? A quick romp through Wikipedia yielded nothing, but I was probably searching through the wrong area.

ETA: davidkinkead appears to have done so.

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