Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote: > At 10:38 PM 5/12/2006, Simmons, Forest wrote: -snip- >> So most of the time, in the context of Candidate Published Orderings, >> Concorcet will >> yield an unambiguous social ordering of the candidates, with no cycles to >> resolve. -snip- >> I would say that's amazing, and extremely relevant to the topic of this >> thread. -snip-
I think an assumption undergirding that conclusion is questionable. Given a voting method that tends to elect a candidate within the sincere top cycle, candidates trying to win will tend to position themselves more closely on more issues than they do under existing voting methods. With smaller distances between candidates, other quirky effects that are hard to predict or analyze will become relatively stronger. If candidates (and their supporters) do not agree on the importance of the issues--for example, some may care much more about abortion, some may care much more about taxes, some may care much more about health care, some may care more about corruption, etc.--then cycles may not be so rare. -snip-- > I'd prefer the flexibility of Asset Voting to the fixed process of Candidate > Published > Ordering, for the latter could still create a minority winner, unless the > rules > prohibited that. -snip- I'm unsure what the writer meant here by "Candidate Published Ordering" and by "minority winner." When I wrote weeks ago about candidates' publishing pre-election orderings, I didn't specify how the votes should be tallied, so in my mind we're writing about a family of voting methods. I wrote then that tallying by MAM would be good, and in some later messages mentioned a simple system using candidate withdrawal and plurality rule. On the other hand, some methods in this family would be quite poor, such as tallying by Borda, which would encourage nomination of a farcically large number of inferior clones. I don't know where the dividing line is between "rules prohibiting a minority winner" and rules that define a member of this large family of voting methods. Is a "minority winner" a candidate not in the sincere top cycle? Assuming he was referring to tallying using candidate withdrawal and plurality rule, I believe I understand his point: Some candidates might "perversely" refuse to withdraw even though staying in elects an inferior or extremist candidate. Although we could abandon the simplicity of "withdrawal//plurality rule" for something like MAM (under which candidates wouldn't need to withdraw to defeat inferior or extreme candidates) or "withdrawal//Instant Runoff" (under which only some major candidates would need to withdraw), I don't see this as a big issue. The incentives on the candidates to do the right thing look fairly strong. If exceptions will be few, why worry? A legislature composed of a supermajority of centrists ought to perform well; a few extremist legislators would be irrelevant. I apologize for not knowing what Asset Voting is. I can glean something from the context, though. So, let me say this: A positive aspect of the "fixed process" of having candidates publish orderings of the candidates prior to the election is that it will help focus attention on the candidates' and voters' relative preferences regarding the various compromise positions on the issues. I think it's more important to elicit this info, when making collective decisions, than to elicit the candidates' and voters' favorite positions. Elections should be about making decisions in the near term; there are plenty of other forums in which current minorities can argue that the elected compromise positions are inferior, to try to make their preferred positions popular enough to be adopted in the future. If I were choosing a proxy to represent me, I'd want to choose someone who would relatively order the plausible compromises similarly to how I would, since ultimately one of the compromises is going to be chosen. Contrast candidates' published orderings with a more familiar method, parliamentary proportional representation systems (PPR). In PPR, each party or candidate adopts positions favored by a significant segment of the voters, to win some seats. (Typically a minority of the seats.) After the election, the elected representatives negotiate to pick the governing executives; assuming no faction won a majority of the seats, some sort of compromise will be reached. My (limited) understanding of the behavior under PPR is that how the parties/candidates will negotiate after the election is not scrutinized much during the period prior to the election, when the focus is more on preferred positions. --Steve ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
