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How to vote for an adequate minimum wage

Almost all political parties in the upcoming election promise to raise the minimum wage, but some promises are worth more than others. If you want an adequate minimum wage, you might want to consider the following options: BIJ1, GroenLinks/PvdA, de Partij voor de Dieren and SP. I’ll explain here (in Dutch).

Visualising electoral systems

Proposal for a new electoral system

The Dutch government has presented a proposal for changing the electoral system, so as to give more weight to votes for individual candidates. Last week, an internet consultation was launched to gather responses to the proposal.

It appears that the launch was a mistake or that the consultation has been withdrawn: last week the consultation was marked as ‘closed’ (although it should run until 19 January); and by now the consultation page can no longer be reached (if you’re interested in the explanatory memorandum for the proposal as published last week, let me know).

If the consultation will re-open with a closing date in January, the consultation period will include the holiday period. This is not unusual.

Slope chart versus scatter plot

Three years ago, I published an analysis that found that giving more weight to votes for individual candidates might benefit female candidates and candidates from outside the dominant ‘Randstad’ region. I used slope charts to illustrate how this might work.

On Mastodon, Jaap de Vries suggested (in Dutch) to replace the slope charts with scatter plots, which is actually a good idea. Adding logarithmic scales sounds good on paper, but doesn’t seem to work very well in practice, imho.