[EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax
abd at lomaxdesign.com
Mon Apr 23 19:39:29 PDT 2007
At 05:53 PM 4/23/2007, Juho wrote:
>Political elections are typically competitive. Polls are typically
>less competitive. Voting on which family size Pizza (of several good
>ones) to buy for the family today may well be a quite non-competitive
>election.
That's true. And one might ask why. Certainly it's understandable in
a family. But it is also understandable in any functional
neighborhood or community organization. Why does this
"non-competitiveness" break down, and under what conditions?
My point in bringing up the pizza example is that I find it odd to
expect that an election method will bring good results in a
competitive environment when it miserably fails in a non-competitive
one. That is, a group of people want to quickly find which of a
number of solutions is maximally satisfactory. Isn't this the problem
of elections?
Somehow it is believed that this doesn't apply to politics. In
politics, the thinking goes, people only want to win, to see "their
side" be the victor. Could it be that the *system* -- which includes
plurality elections -- actually encourages this?
What we see about Range is that it works quite well under competitive
conditions, it is certainly not *worse* than FPTP, and, many of us
would argue, than Condorcet methods. It usually finds the Condorcet
winner, anyway, in examples which stick close to real-world
conditions. And when it doesn't, it finds a *better* winner.
The argument against Range typically goes: in competitive elections,
where people really want their favorite to win, they will bullet
vote, thus reducing the election to Approval.
It's probably false. Sure, *partisans* will vote that way, we can
expect, but many, many voters consider themselves independents. There
is a cost to bullet-voting. It is essentially an abstention from
every pairwise election other than those involving the favorite. In a
strong two-party contest, where third parties are essentially
irrelevant, we can expect partisans not to care about that. And,
indeed, many of them may *not* bullet-vote, but will assign some
value to one or more third party candidates. It is a way for them to
express their leanings without risk of "losing."
It's important to realize that Plurality *often* chooses the correct
winner, i.e., the candidate who will win under either Range or a
Condorcet method. It probably does this more often than not, though
strong two-party systems tend to shift positions and match each other
so that they remain close to parity.
The problem is in the few percent of nonpartisan voters and
third-party voters, what can *they* do? Range and Approval (and IRV,
though not as safely) bring them in out of the cold, eliminating the
immediate spoiler effect. That alone is well worth, with Approval,
simply dropping the no-overvoting rules, which in one fell swoop and
with minimum fuss and no cost turns elections into the most basic Range method.
The IRV promoters here have Proportional Representation as a
long-term goal. They don't really talk about their strategy, as far
as anything we have seen, they are *not* people who believe in
democracy in reform movements, they are one-pointed and, as far as we
have seen, quite inflexible. But I suspect that their strategy is to
bring IRV, which is, of course, single-winner STV, and then, they
might think, the path to PR is open.
But STV and IRV are actually worlds apart. The offensive effects
possible in IRV, particularly center-squeeze, which can easily defeat
a strong Condorcet winner (who will also win under Approval), is far
less damaging in the multiwinner context. STV is quite a reasonable
method, multiwinner, though we think there may be better. The
strategy could backfire, if there is a prominent election failure.
That is, the bad taste generated as a result of IRV defects could
attach to STV and thus to PR.
But the IRV people (by which I mean the political activists, there
are some theoretical analysts who favor IRV who are exceptions) won't
actually discuss the issue. It's a shame, actually.
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