One potential criticism of this method is the appeal to precedence: while using party lists (modulo the similarity scores, which seems like a straightforward and uncontroversial improvement) in this way has been used to much success in the Nordic countries, approval voting is (somewhat surprisingly IMO) not well established. As far as governments go, I only know of St. Louis and Fargo, ND using approval- that is, two municipalities. One could observe the concern that we don’t have much empirical data on how approval works in the real world.
One response is simply to respond that experiments have to be done, otherwise we will never know what works. Perhaps it is ideal to do experiments starting small (e.g. Fargo and St. Louis) and building up towards larger results; but I also have a sense of urgency that voting reform in the US matters greatly, and the faster it can be implemented, the less likely the world is to go in a bad direction v within the next {5, 10, 20, 50} years.
The other response is to observe that while we lack empirical data, the theoretical case for Approval is very solid and promising (I don’t have time to further substantiate this right now)
One potential criticism of this method is the appeal to precedence: while using party lists (modulo the similarity scores, which seems like a straightforward and uncontroversial improvement) in this way has been used to much success in the Nordic countries, approval voting is (somewhat surprisingly IMO) not well established. As far as governments go, I only know of St. Louis and Fargo, ND using approval- that is, two municipalities. One could observe the concern that we don’t have much empirical data on how approval works in the real world.
One response is simply to respond that experiments have to be done, otherwise we will never know what works. Perhaps it is ideal to do experiments starting small (e.g. Fargo and St. Louis) and building up towards larger results; but I also have a sense of urgency that voting reform in the US matters greatly, and the faster it can be implemented, the less likely the world is to go in a bad direction v within the next {5, 10, 20, 50} years.
The other response is to observe that while we lack empirical data, the theoretical case for Approval is very solid and promising (I don’t have time to further substantiate this right now)