Talk:2010 Venezuelan parliamentary election

The upshot of this remains...

...that the PSUV got 58%-59% of the available seats in the Assembly on 48.20% of the vote. The number of seats necessary to pass "enabling laws" which give special powers to the President is 60% (three-fifths of the Assembly). That the PSUV missed the 60% cutoff and no chicanery has been undertaken to make it look like they actually did get it is a testament to some degree of fairness being present in the Venezuelan electoral system, but the fact that a minority of the voters got this close to that 60% constitutional supermajority of seats is deeply disturbing from an objective proportionality perspective, and numerous commentators both in and outside of Venezuela remarked on this. No amount of playing around with words or saying "all systems are a little disproportionate" or "the system didn't change much from 2005 to 2010" is going to change that. Zachary Klaas (talk) 19:03, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Your personal objection to the Venezuelan electoral system is noted, but I don't see how it's relevant. Generally I'm in favour of proportionality (more like the German system), but this is the Venezuelan one, and the opposition forfeited the right to be involved in electoral law 2005 - 2010 by boycotting the previous election on spurious grounds; their political call, and in hindsight a bad one. The opposition's objection is purely political: if they had 59% of the seats on whatever % of the vote, they would be defending the system to the hilt, and using that majority to their full political advantage. Now, please stop removing the CNE's point of information that the disproportionality inherent in the system did not uniquely favour PSUV: it clearly favoured PSUV on a national basis, but not in every state. That is meaningful and relevant information for readers trying to understand the complex system, whereas your calculation of what exact seats PSUV/MUD would have got under a hypothetical, non-existent, completely proportional system is mere detail to El Pais' view. Rd232 ^talk 20:43, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

I had originally written something else here, but I see that Rd232 has added language to make it clear that "the PSUV won around 59% of the seats with around 49% of the vote", which is basically what I wanted represented in the first place. If that language remains, I have no need to escalate this conflict further; that's all I really wanted shown. I still think the director of the CNE's argument is loopy, but if this language remains, I do not feel we need to relegate the CNE director's comment to a footnote, as the proper context to evaluate that argument has been provided. Sorry if I ruffled feathers getting to this point, but I'm glad we did get there.  :) Zachary Klaas (talk) 01:20, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Well I eventually gathered that despite this info being in various places in the article, you wanted it there to provide context for the El Pais claim, which is fair enough, it helps the reader. I still don't see how you think the CNE argument is loopy; it's hardly an argument at all, just a statement of fact. It would be clearer if we had a table of state-based vote % and state-based seats (could squeeze that into the already massive result table, but perhaps better not!), but the way the argument has been presented it implies the disproportionality is uniquely favouring PSUV in every state, rather than just in toto at national level, and clarifying that is important because the system is quite confusing. Rd232 ^talk 10:21, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

I did update the addition to show exact figures because we know them (the PSUV winning 96 of 162 seats = the PSUV winning 59.26% of the seats; the percentage of PSUV seats over the total Assembly, 96 of 165 seats, is 58.18%; the PSUV got 48.20% of the vote). Zachary Klaas (talk) 01:33, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

I wouldn't have added the additional precision, which in this context is liable to distract from the argument; as is introducing the 3 indigenous seats - it's just too much detail for the casual reader to grasp what's actually being said (the info is available elsewhere). In addition, there is a confusing ambiguity introduced about whether the 48.2% applies to the 162 seats or to the 165. Can we not just go back to the simpler version of this I had written? Rd232 ^talk 10:21, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Okay, I've fixed this so the argument appears simpler in the main text, while still providing the necessary clarifying information in footnotes for readers who want to understand in more depth. (I presume that is the point, for those readers who want to understand to have a resource that makes that possible, instead of "dumbing the article down".) Zachary Klaas (talk) 12:12, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

OK, I think that's good. Presenting complex information in an accessible way is more of an art than a science, especially when you have to account for very different audiences. This is about right I think. Rd232 ^talk 13:09, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Fair enough - glad we could work this out.  :) Zachary Klaas (talk) 13:28, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm fine with Rd232's presentation of 59% of the seats on 48% of the vote: what I (still) dislike about the footnote is that is assigns seats (down to the nearest hundredth of a seat!) on the basis of a completely hypothetical electoral system. If we're going to do that, why not use the state-based proportional system which is implied by Venezuela's Constitution? Assuming apportionment by the D'Hondt system (as for the current party list seats), that would give the PSUV 85 seats, MUD 74 seats and the PPT 3 seats. The D'Hondt calculation can be carried out using only the data we already include in the article, so doesn't fall foul of WP:OR. Physchim62 (talk) 15:13, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

El Pais' reference is to the previous system. It makes more sense to have a footnote to elaborate on that comparison than to compare with a hypothetical, completely proportional system as Zachary's footnote does (not least since the detail of the calculation pretty well obscures the basic point: under a completely proportional system, equal vote shares would get equal seats; it's pretty obvious and going into much detail just obscures that...). Anyway, perhaps we could just have an extra footnote. Rd232 ^talk 19:30, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

The separation of nominal and party votes in the 2009 electoral reform

I just noticed this new edit from Rd232:

"In addition, the law completely separated the district vote and the party list votes. Previously, parties winning nominal district seats had had these subtracted from the total won under the proportional party list, which had encouraged parties to game the system by creating separate parties for the party list."

Two observations:

• First, that is proof that the system after 2009 is now "mixed member majoritarian" rather than "mixed member proportional", because that mechanism is required in order to establish proportionality - the seats allotted by party list in an MMP system are allotted on the basis of compensation for the disproportionality of the nominal seats (see the definition from IDEA I already provided earlier on this talk page).
• Second, it is not necessary to disconnect the nominal and list elections in order to prevent this kind of system gaming, as the practice of creating "decoy lists" is something that could be made illegal. [When the Citizens Assembly of Ontario advocated an MMP model for that Canadian province, it specifically acknowledged the "decoy list" phenomenon but rejected the view that this was a structural feature of MMP: "In rare cases in MMP systems, a party has attempted to manipulate the system by splitting into two parties—one party runs local candidates only and the other party runs list candidates only. This is sometimes referred to as a 'decoy list.' Decoy lists result in an inflated seat total for the parties because their seat shares are calculated separately, even though they are really one party. It is very unlikely that this would occur in Ontario, given the political culture. Decoy lists have not been attempted in the four jurisdictions examined here (Germany, New Zealand, Scotland, and Wales). If there was a concern that parties might manipulate the system in this way, the practice could be prohibited by law." See this reference on page 150 for the quote.] Anyway, I will nevertheless leave this wording alone in the article because venezuelaanalysis.com, being the pro-PSUV-biased source it typically is, no doubt represents the legislative intention of the PSUV in making this change during a period where they were in dominant control of the National Assembly.

That's interesting, because it explains why the opposition were complaining about the 2009 reforms. The new districts are prima facie fairer than the 2005 districts in those states that have been redistricted: although the CNE still allows a wide disparity in district size, this has at least been reduced from 10.06:1 to 7.22:1 between smallest and largest ;) Mapping the 2010 votes onto the 2005 districts with no proportional correction gives PSUV 64+33=97, MUD 33+31=64, PPT 2+1=3 (nominal+list=total). Physchim62 (talk) 15:27, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

The source notes that the Supreme Court declared that decoy lists were legal. I suppose they could have passed a law to ban them, rather than decouple the nominal and list seats, unless there were issues with that being unconstitutional? Anyway, preventing decoy lists works in favour of smaller parties, I think. Rd232 ^talk 19:23, 2 October 2010 (UTC)

Physchim, your data is a lot better than mine - you can map the votes from 2010 onto 2005's geography? You'll have to tell me where your source for the data that permits that operation is, I'd love to see it. Rd232, you're probably right - in the Italian election of 2001, where the first attempts to seriously run decoy lists were made, it was Silvio Berlusconi's right-wing House of Freedoms alliance that did it first, with the left-wing Olive Tree alliance following suit shortly thereafter - the small parties were not the main offenders, and really the strategy is only effective for big parties that have already won a lot of nominal seats. I note that it was a small party in Venezuela that tried this in 2005, though. Zachary Klaas (talk) 22:35, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Well, the 2010 districts are here, the 2005 districts are here: you will see that the district boundaries only changed in six states and the Capital District, which makes the job a lot easier. Then you go to the election results site, and click on "Ver Resultados para este Estado" for each of the states of interest in turn: you will see that you can view the results for each municipality in the state (you can actually go down to individual polling stations, but there's no need). So you add up the results for the municipalities according to the 2005 district boundaries (database software helps not to get lost in all the information) and bingo, you have your comparison. Physchim62 (talk) 23:58, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

Thanks, Physchim. Having numbers is always good in any discussion over the characteristics of an election.  :) Zachary Klaas (talk) 14:03, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

"district boundaries only changed in six states and the Capital District" - would be worth having in the article. Also, in the Electoral reform section there's currently a sentence which says " Under the new law, in 2009, electoral districts were redefined in a way that has been accused of favouring the PSUV, particularly in giving more weight to votes in the countryside over those in the city", which I'm not convinced about. Did the rural/urban weighting actually change from 2005, either through the redistricting or the other changes? If so, the how should be explained, instead of leaving such vagueness hanging in the air. Rd232 ^talk 10:26, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

I'm concerned that this involves further spin. From what I've seen of the opposition comments, the complaints do not seem to be directed against the changes from 2005 to 2010. The complaints seem to be about the general inequity of representation between rural and urban areas. In other words, they may have had a problem with this inequity being present in the 2005 system as well. To have the article say "things changed minimally from 2005 to 2010" when the criticisms are not focused on that issue seems a bit like it's setting up a straw man argument. Zachary Klaas (talk) 14:02, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

A lot of the media coverage doesn't make that clear, and the sentence I just quoted from the article doesn't either. Objections to the recent changes should be distinguished from older ones, thus clarifying both. Rd232 ^talk 14:37, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

I'd go further than Rd232 along the same lines: most of the "noisy" complaints which have been reported outside Venezuela have specified the 2009 reform. So what we need to do is give as much context as we can. Redistricting in 2009 seems like a red-herring. Rd232 says that there was a proportional correction for the 2005 party lists, and the removal of that obviously makes the system more majoritarian: but a majoritarian system is not the same as a "gerrymandered" system for any reasonably neutral, encyclopedic discussion. Physchim62 (talk) 15:30, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

I conceded previously on this talk page that a case could be made for calling the 2005 system MMP, because IDEA does. On the other hand, I also stressed that the goal of anything properly considered MMP is to bring the percentage of seats a party receives in harmony with the percentage of votes the party receives, according to IDEA's definition of that goal. I also pointed out that the implementation of that system via smaller geographic areas (in this case, Venezuela's states) was something IDEA specifically referred to as detracting from proportional results. I would accept describing the system as a weak MMP system, but not as MMP without qualifiers, since the results provided were not proportional. Zachary Klaas (talk) 17:30, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

grammar

I've just added another tag for the grammar, which reviewing part of the article shows its not up to scratch, and a memebr of the WP:GOCE can now edit it.Lihaas (talk) 22:40, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Which part of the article? This is another case of "drive-by tagging" – please stop it, it is not helpful. Physchim62 (talk) 02:21, 5 October 2010 (UTC)

Why a transclusion for the table of results?

I have noticed that the small results table is transcluded. Why not just putting the contents in this page? Davidsevilla | Talk 21:09, 15 October 2010 (UTC)

It's quite a common solution for election results tables: it means they can easily be used on several articles. Possible reuse in this case (I haven't checked if the template is actually reused) include Politics of Venezuela and National Assembly of Venezuela. Physchim62 (talk) 00:12, 16 October 2010 (UTC)

Possible Template error in the info box

Hi, odd wikicode shows up in the infobox [the party1 line] as: "style="text-align: center; border-bottom: 6px solid

   F0001C"| ".

I suspect it has to do with the template, but I'm not sure how to fix it. I created this template here [[1]], but I don't think I had to. Another template already existed here: [[2]] For comparison, the template for the 2nd group in the infobox [[3]] shows up fine in the infobox and it has the exact same style. How do I fix it the template so the correct link shows in the infobox? If I change the line to "PSUV", it shows up as "United Socialist Party of Venezuela ". I think it just has to be redirected, I'm just not sure exactly where to do it. Thank you, David O. Johnson (talk) 09:05, 24 November 2013 (UTC)

article

The popular vote totals cited in this article from the National Electoral Council of Venezuela and Psephos, both (presumably) reliable sources, contradict each other. Holdek (talk) 02:21, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

Which numbers are you looking at (which tables) specifically? There is a very small (but curious) difference in the total votes received by the PSUV; according to Psephos/Adam Carr, the PSUV received 5,451,419, whereas, according to the CNE (which is definitely a more official/authoritative source), the PSUV received 5,451,422. That's a 3 vote difference. Is this the contradiction that you are referring to? Riothero (talk) 14:35, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

I've identified where the 3 votes came from! Miranda state, where, according to the CNE, PSUV received 501,468 votes, but, according to Psephos's data (which itself cites CNE as a source), PSUV received 501,465. I propose just going with CNE's numbers all the way. Riothero (talk) 14:47, 25 July 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for tracking those votes down.  :)

Psephos also reports "other" receiving 155,429 votes, whereas CNE reports it as 168,737.

I'm fine with just going with CNE's totals throughout if that's what Psephos was as using as its source (I'm guessing CNE published updated, finalized vote totals after Psesphos had already made its report). --Holdek (talk) 17:27, 25 July 2014 (UTC)