Is Europeia Actually Less Political Than Before, Or Is It All Nonsense?

hyanygo said:
With citizen count data I think then we'll be able to tell a better story.
Citizen count over time is actually a surprisingly difficult figure to find, but I think you've convinced me that votes per Senate is not the perfect measure here.
 
PhDre said:
GraVandius said:
Sopo said:
Very thought-provoking. I, for one, rarely use all my votes these days. It was more common for me to do so in the past, however. I would be interested to know if newer members are more likely to use all of their votes than older members. In this past election, I used 5 of my 7 votes, but as recently as a few months ago I only used 3. It may not change much how we think about this data, but now I'm curious about it anyway.
In all the elections I have participated in I've only not used all my votes once if at all.
Voting for everyone who you think is qualified is not strategic. For example, people who felt super strongly about Skizzy being elected should have only voted for him. I know if I had voted 'strategically' I would have a) waited until the last minute to vote in the general Senate election b) only voted for Skizzy in this example.

Instead, I voted for all three of Calvin, Skizzy and Possibly This earlier in the election. But anyway, being strategic means not using all available votes.




A radical and bad idea I had was for us to vote for anonymous platforms instead of candidates. :sleep:

I felt strongly that we needed a few good solid legislators that were focused on the Senate this term. With no offense intended to the other multi-term Senator candidates that were running, for that reason, I only voted for Skizzy and Noto for the rationale that PhDre explains above.

If the timing of the elections hadn't been over the holidays, set to close when I'd be at work, I may have voted towards the end of the voting period, where I could more strategically use all my votes to prevent a runoff or ensure that my voting for [other candidate] wouldn't result in that individual replacing Skizzy or Noto in the Senate. I usually use all of my votes, however, so this election was an anomaly for me.

For the record, I'm planning to do some investigating into how Europeians view elections now (and how/when they cast their votes, etc.) in a MousePoll later this week sometime. If you (collective you, not aimed at HEM or anyone else in particular) wants something you want asked, drop me a message with the details.
 
HEM said:
hyanygo said:
With citizen count data I think then we'll be able to tell a better story.
Citizen count over time is actually a surprisingly difficult figure to find, but I think you've convinced me that votes per Senate is not the perfect measure here.
Citizen counts from June 2015 till now are available in the Statistics Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1g7kHiGhUsd6Eu4xI-LdM3OodkdGSjt1FSgdRcRaE3AI/edit#gid=297060904

Earlier citizen counts can be gleaned from the revision history of the Citizenship Spreadsheet.
 
r3naissanc3r said:
HEM said:
hyanygo said:
With citizen count data I think then we'll be able to tell a better story.
Citizen count over time is actually a surprisingly difficult figure to find, but I think you've convinced me that votes per Senate is not the perfect measure here.
Citizen counts from June 2015 till now are available in the Statistics Spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1g7kHiGhUsd6Eu4xI-LdM3OodkdGSjt1FSgdRcRaE3AI/edit#gid=297060904

Earlier citizen counts can be gleaned from the revision history of the Citizenship Spreadsheet.
Thank you!!
 
I feel like a better metric for political activity would be average number of citizens who comment on at least one Senate thread/ number of citizens. That metric would not run into the ceiling I described earlier.

Additionally a metric for percentage of informed voters could be gleaned from average number of citizens who comment on at least one Senate thread/ (votes cast/candidate)
 
GraVandius said:
I feel like a better metric for political activity would be average number of citizens who comment on at least one Senate thread/ number of citizens. That metric would not run into the ceiling I described earlier.

Additionally a metric for percentage of informed voters could be gleaned from average number of citizens who comment on at least one Senate thread/ (votes cast/candidate)
Do you have data on this stretching back? I don't disagree that it might be a better metric, but I don't believe there's any way to go back in time and tell who was a citizen when they made a comment here or there, or to remove counts of multiple posts being made by the same individual.
 
Mousebumples said:
GraVandius said:
I feel like a better metric for political activity would be average number of citizens who comment on at least one Senate thread/ number of citizens. That metric would not run into the ceiling I described earlier.

Additionally a metric for percentage of informed voters could be gleaned from average number of citizens who comment on at least one Senate thread/ (votes cast/candidate)
Do you have data on this stretching back? I don't disagree that it might be a better metric, but I don't believe there's any way to go back in time and tell who was a citizen when they made a comment here or there, or to remove counts of multiple posts being made by the same individual.
Someone would simply have to dig through the oval room and cross check with who the candidates were no? It would be immensely time consuming and I was only throwing it out there.
 
Fascinating analysis, but there are some statistical and methodological flaws in my opinion.

I can buy into the idea of Total Activity being defined by the number of votes, but I find no need to divide it by the number of seats, how would this be relevant to an aggregate metric? Anyway its not a critical flaw if that is a fairly static variable - which it is relatively.

So then we graph out that metric and find it has increased significantly with time - fine. But then we use an increasing metric as the divisor in another calculation to find "Political Activity". Is it thus any wonder we would then find Political Activity is decreasing?

What this proves is that there is a correlation between the number of Senate candidates and the number of Seats, and that both are relatively static.

So, this Analysis does prove something - albeit not exactly what the Author is saying.

What it proves is that in our electoral system we have had a gradually rising total population of Voters over the years, particularly recently, but we haven't increased the number of Senate seats substantially, thus the Candidate number hasn't increased.

And that is a function of a conscious decision to try and keep the Senate as a small body, presumably because of concerns over how a larger Senate would function. And that comes down to the "Size of the Senate" clauses 6-9, in the Election Act 2015, and precursor Acts, the methodology of which encourages a small Senate and effectively limits the size to a maximum of 10.

If we opened the next Senate elections with 11 places, and the next with 15, we would fill them, and more, I suspect, and all these metrics would change consequently.

Thus, in conclusion, the size of the Senate in terms of the number of candidates is intrinsically connected to the number of Seats, in a Supply-Demand type relationship, and the number of seats available is kept artificially low by the System, and hasn't been increased with the growth of the Electorate.

So the "de-politicization" of the Region is thus a conscious decision taken by the legislators who created the Electoral Panel system, and indeed the Panel itself - composed of the Speaker of the Senate, the President of the Republic, and the Office of the Supreme Chancellor. A decision to maintain the "elite" nature of the Senate, to make it more desirable, to increase competition to get into it - rather than to increase participation in it. That, is the root of this trend, not any kind of intrinsic de-politicization of our Culture, imo.
 
Back
Top