Word: pr
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Proportional Representation (PR)-which Kenneth Arrow, Professor of Economics yesterday proposed using for the elections to the new Faculty Council-is perhaps the most complicated and least understood of voting systems...
...further represent all points of view within each constituency, elections of each group's representatives should not be held along essentially artificial lines such as the Houses, but at large, under a proportional representation (PR) system. With a carefully designed PR system, each committee would be as close to a microcosm of the Faculty and its students as any electoral system could make...
...PR places a premium on "number one" votes and the surest way to get them is by appealing to a small but solid block of voters-often the residents of one particular area of the City. Though the City's elections are non-partisan, attempts are sometimes made to arrange electoral coalitions. The Cambridge Civic Association (CCA), for example, encourages its supporters to give all their votes to endorsed candidates pledging to follow its "good government" politics. Yet each of the CCA councillors-who always number four-can be identified, without too much difficulty, with one or more particular blocs...
...Thus, PR-and the lack of any real political parties in local politics-produces a council with little cohesiveness. Each councillor tends to look after the affairs of his own particular turf. "What about the children of East Cambridge? Don't they have a right to play too?" Councillor Alfred E Vellucci-a vocal foe of the universities-has many times roared when a playground for another section of the City is under discussion...
...structure of politics which evolved under Cambridge's PR-Council-Manager system was one admirably suited to its chief problems of five, ten or twenty years ago, which were to maintain peace among the sometimes antagonistic groups making up the City to give each its fair share of services, and to make sure that taxes did not increase over-much...