Posts by Andrew Geddis
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Speaker: Gender quotas (and helping…, in reply to Paul Williams,
Are our political expectations heavily differentiated by gender?
What I meant to say is that if you look back over the history of representation in NZ (and elsewhere), the sort of qualities that are thought to make a "good" candidate are things that men (on the whole) are more likely to possess and display - hence the gendered nature of our concept of "merit" in this area, and why the overwhelming majority of people chosen as representative just happen to have penises.
I’m curious then to know what the political proxies in fact are.
I think we see this every time a political pundit opines on why such-and-such an individual is a good politician - their "decisiveness", their "strength", their "determination", etc, etc. All of which are good things when men do it, but for a woman ...?
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Graeme's example proves the limits of the "only choose on merit" argument in relation to political candidates.
The A's were able to do what they did because:
(1) Baseball has defined rules that clearly establish the objectives of the game - you must score more runs than your opponents to win;
(2) Baseball has lots and lots and lots of data that allows you to work out which players doing which things will best help you to achieve the objective in (1).
This then allows you to make very, very precise judgments about the effect that choosing one player over another will have on the team's ability to win games. So "merit" is reducible down to some fairly simply factors - does this pitcher have a lower ERA than others? Does this batter get on base more often than others? etc, etc, etc.(In the A's case, of course, they were early adaptors to the idea that the data was of far greater predictive value than the subjective assessments of individual scouts, which (for a while) gave them a comparative advantage over their competitors.)
Turning to the field of politics, there is nothing like (1) or (2) available. We could start a list of what the objective of politics is ... and I'll bet we will generate a comment thread of several hundred entries, no two of which exactly align. And even if we could come up with a list of commonly agreed objectives for politics (which we can't), there is nothing to tell us with mathematical certainty what sort of candidate will better enable a party to attain that objective than another.
Which means in the field of political candidatures, we go for generalised approximations - just like the baseball scouts did in the pre-Money Ball era. So, we do the political equivalent of looking at a baseball player's "athleticism", their "temperament", whether they have an "easy swing", etc, etc, etc. All of which carry subjective biases - the "merit" of a given potential candidate vis-s-vis another depends on what it is you start out looking for, because you assume a "good player" has these things. And we know - because history is good at telling us some things - that what it is people look for in political candidates is deeply gendered in nature, irrespective of how hard they try to correct for it.
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Speaker: Gender quotas (and helping…, in reply to Russell Brown,
Oh please! Fewer male MPs. :-) #oneupmanship
May we compromise on "lesser"?
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Speaker: Gender quotas (and helping…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I freely grant you're right in the sense that every new party list is likely to see some sitting MPs fare poorly.
Well, not if you just rank your sitting MPs as 1-34 on the party list (as has happened in the past).
But that cheap and completely unnecessary display of one-upmanship aside, I agree there will be some shifting of the furniture for 2014, and also think Graeme is right that this will see some current male MPs "demoted" (as in, given lower list placings in 2014 than in 2011). But that doesn't necessarily mean there will be less male MPs than presently -- even if Labour doesn't achieve the heroic leap in support that the current polls appear to show, it will do substantially better than in 2011. So there are going to be more places for Labour individuals in Parliament (and so a lower list spot may well be good enough to elect those moved down.)
Having said that, while I think Labour's move is an admirable one, we shouldn't fool ourselves that it is going to be easy in practice. It requires a couple of tricky judgment calls:
(1) A prediction as to which electorate seats it will win, and the sex of the MP thereby elected;
(2) A prediction as to the likely share of the party vote, so you can know where on the list the likely cut-off for list MPs will fall (and also note, this prediction has to be made by nomination day at the latest, which is a good month before election day).
Get either of these wrong, and you can end up under-or-over shooting the quota by a margin. Which then raises the question: do you configure the list to guard against under shooting (i.e. put a larger number of women in the top list slots, in case more electorate MPs (who tend to be male) than planned for get elected), or do you accept the risk of undershooting by sticking with your working assumptions on electorates and structuring the list so that if the assumptions are right, you hit your 45% number (but if its wrong, you'll miss it)?
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Hard News: Moving right along?, in reply to Seamus Harris,
Not a crime, but in most workplaces this would be a sackable offense.
Probably true. But the mayor is not an employee, and isn't subject to employment law standards. So it is a false equivalence.
Furthermore, there's a number of different standards that apply to different "workplaces". For example, having an affair with a subordinate and not revealing it to your superiors is a sackable offence in the military (as we've just been reminded). It wouldn't be in a University. So before we say "a council employee who did what Brown did would be sacked, so Brown should be, too", we have to establish both that the same set of workplace conduct rules and consequences for breaching those rules ought to apply in both cases.
With regards that last point, only one group really matter - the people of whom Brown is their representative. And despite your personal outrage at his actions, they just don't seem to care that much. Which doesn't mean your view is wrong, as such ... but it just isn't going to win.
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Legal Beagle: Fact check: Q+A on mayoral…, in reply to Alison Poole,
It’s hardly difficult to find out the law, you don’t need a QC, just go to Google, type in “Local Government Act”, pull the page up and search for “election”:
Maybe this was the problem - they did this google search and couldn't find anything. It's the "Local Electoral Act" that governs the matter (:->)
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Legal Beagle: Fact check: Q+A on mayoral…, in reply to Steve Todd,
(I suppose it all means, too, that mayoral candidates who now still want out before polling day, for any reason not involving incapacity, would just have to stop campaigning and ask people to vote for someone else – it appears such situations are no longer specifically covered in the Act.)
Right - as happened in Hamilton this time around: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=11139352
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Legal Beagle: Fact check: Q+A on mayoral…, in reply to FletcherB,
So if any mayoral (or other elected) candidate withdraws after the election but before the official results/signing in… thats EXACTLY the same as as if they withdrew any-time in the previous 12-months
I don’t think this is right. It assumes a mayoral (or other elected) candidate can “withdraw” after the election but before being confirmed in the position that they have won. Where in the Local Electoral Act does it say that this can happen? Because s.87 only talks about a candidate who “dies or becomes incapable under any Act of holding the office for which the candidate was nominated” – and in those cases, it requires a new election to be held (not the runner-up to be appointed).
Point being – if Brown had resigned as mayor the day the story broke, he would have become mayor again upon the day after the announcement of the official results of the 2013 election (see s.115(1)) … and have to resign again (or not, as the case may have been).
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Hard News: Everybody's Machiavelli, in reply to BenWilson,
IANAL, but it was my understanding that giving a reference is something previous employers are required by law to do, and they can’t say anything bad.
That would kind of defeat the purpose of "a reference", wouldn't it? Having to tell someone else that the thieving, psychopathic drunk you fired is "a conscientious team player with good people skills".
So ... no. Not how it works at all.
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Hard News: Everybody's Machiavelli, in reply to Phil Wallington,
There are just three infallible rules of conduct which apply.
1. Do not have sexual relationships with work colleagues.Oh dear. Do you want to break news of this rule to my wife in her office the floor above mine, or do I really have to do it myself?