Peter Emerson

So this is a book about how majority rule is bad and leads to inefficiency, violence, war, etc. along with proposals for better, more inclusive voting methods. It's somewhat textbook-like and I skimmed some of the boring parts.

The introductory anti-majoritarian stuff is good, and if you're new to this concept you should read those parts. However, I was already trending anti-majoritarian going into this, and primarily hoping to learn about some clear-cut examples of majoritarianism gone wrong in the real world. Chapter 4 does have a bunch of examples, but they're just a few paragraphs each, and not that clearly causal or memorable, so I'm a little disappointed in that:

Majority votes are indeed divisive. Most of the Orthodox in Croatia boycotted the poll. Most of the Catholics, 93.2 % of the 83.6 % turnout, voted in favour, and independence was declared. It started a war.

Well, I'm not surprised that it did, but could you explain a bit more about the why and the how, to convince us that there's a direct relationship?

Since then, however, despite many attempts at some form of inter-tribal power-sharing, the newly-born [South Sudan] has imploded. Was this very western instrument best suited to Africa?

Well, I don't know, was it? That's kind of why I'm reading this book.

Another document by the author, the book chapter Majority Rule – A Cause of War? in [b:The Ashgate Research Companion to War: Origins and Prevention|14825623|The Ashgate Research Companion to War Origins and Prevention|Hall Gardner|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1359625679s/14825623.jpg|20479208] does a better job of summarizing the real-world examples, I think.

He advocates systems like Borda count as the solution to majoritarian problems, which is an ok system in theory, but falls apart as soon as people vote strategically. All of the principles he's arguing for ("less adversarial points system of decision-making") would apply equally well (or better) to cardinal voting systems, though, which don't fail so spectacularly under strategy, so I'll pretend he was arguing for those.

It also has a bunch of examples of the difficulties of parliaments "forming a government", which is a foreign concept to me as an American. It laments that this is "a strange way to run a country", and I agree, but then why did I spend so much time reading about it? I guess I was hoping it would lead to some valuable lesson at the end, but I didn't get anything out of it other than "British government is weird". Likewise with his advocacy of the matrix vote method, which only makes sense in the context of parliaments where you elect your cabinet from among the people you already elected to be your government; weird stuff and not that useful in general.

Oh, and he defines a bunch of abbreviations at the beginning of the book, like NI for Northern Ireland and GNU for "Government of national unity", and then expects you to remember what they all mean throughout the rest of the book. Is it really that hard to write out a few words?

He's written several books that sound like they are essentially updated editions of the same content but with different titles? The book that I had actually seen recommended was [b:The Politics of Consensus: For the Resolution of Conflict and Reform of Majority Rule|37938238|The Politics of Consensus For the Resolution of Conflict and Reform of Majority Rule|Peter J. Emerson|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1516809795s/37938238.jpg|59662875] (1994), but that's a hardcover that I had to get shipped to my house and carry around instead of an ebook I could read on my phone during lunch, so I ended up reading the ebook first. I'll try to read the hardcover, though I assume it's largely the same information, only more out-of-date.… (lisätietoja)