On Mon, 2011-10-17 at 00:19 +0100, Kevin Venzke wrote: > Hi, > > --- En date de : Dim 16.10.11, matt welland <m...@kiatoa.com> a écrit : > > > It has been shown, here, and in journal articles, that > > Approval will > > > soon home in on the CW. After a few > > > elecions. But "a few elections" can be a decade or > > more. We'd like > > > better results before that, and so > > > > Does this prediction of "a few" elections account for polls > > typically > > done over and over prior to the election also being done > > with approval? > > My hunch is that Approval would have an immediate > > disruptive (in a good > > way) impact if the accompanying polls were also approval. > > I completely agree with that. Swap "a few elections" with "a few > polling iterations" and you should be where you wanted. > > Approval's weakness is that it has to decide where the main contest is > prior to the vote. If there are few good options (i.e. any pair of > frontrunners leaves a large percentage of voters approving neither) or > too many good options (i.e. several likely candidates for sincere CW) a > rank method, with its "higher resolution," may be able to fish out a > better result.
Hmmm... It seems to me that both those scenarios actually say something useful and even possibly important about the election results that would be lost in a ranked election. Assuming that a) decent information about the candidates has been available via news, web and debates and b) reasonable quality approval polls have been conducted prior to the election then: In the case where there are too few good options then clearly the candidates do not represent a good cross section of the values and criteria considered important to the people or the people are are too diverse to be easily represented. This is not a problem that can be solved by an election system. All a ranked system would do is hide the issue and choose some candidate that clearly a large portion of the population would not be happy with. In the case where there are many good options then approval is exposing that fact. It is true that this scenario makes strategic voting more important but since we are assuming that decent information and prior polling is available I think voters can apply a pretty simple strategy to decide if it is safe to not vote for the front runner they don't really like. Assuming a party or conservative/liberal philosophical split then if the candidate they do like is ahead of the leading candidate in the opposing camp then they can safely not vote for the front runner in their camp they don't like. Hard to explain but trivial once understood. Again, I think it is very, very important to note that the ranked systems actually lose or hide information relative to approval in both these cases. Note that in the first case the results and impact of a ranked system are actually worse than the results of approval. The political pressure to converge and appeal to a broad spectrum is greater under approval than the ranked systems. The evaluation of a voting system only makes sense in the context of all the other things going on in a society. The pressure on politicians to actually meet the needs of the people is a massively important factor and ranked systems appear to wash out some of that force which is a very bad thing IMHO. In the second case a ranked system *might* select a "more preferred" candidate but if you have several candidates all getting 75% approval then really, do you (pragmatically speaking) care which one gets chosen? I think we'd all be thrilled to have that problem. If we did have that problem you can be assured that not only would most people be reasonably happy with the outcome but there would almost certainly be open and intelligent dialog on moving to a ranked system - something that can never happen under plurality. In other words approval is the gateway drug to the really good stuff, a ranked system of some sort (*). Matt -=- (*) I personally suspect there is no need to go to a ranked system as there are lots of good people who would make a great leader, all that is needed is to keep who ever gets chosen fully accountable to the people, something that approval appears to do better than any other system. > Kevin Venzke > > ---- > Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info ---- Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info