[EM] Tyranny of the Majority

[Forest Simmons]

When the only information available is simple preference, then majority
rule would be the only democratic choice. But that's not the context of
the posting to which Demorep replied below.

Suppose that you know strength of preferences:

51 A > B >> C
49 B > C >> A

The majority choice is A.

The Approval choice is B with 100% approval.

Suppose that the above table represented the result of an Approval
election with expressive ballots of the type that Demorep and I have been
advocating, which allow voters to express rankings and/or ratings along
with an approval cutoff indicator of some kind such as the virtual Minimum
Acceptable Candidate or the Yes/No marks next to each candidate name.

Demorep's ACLA and ACMA methods would both pick A as the winner, because C
would be eliminated in the first step because of insufficient approval,
and the Condorcet winner A would be chosen by the next step, without any
need to invoke approval again since the Smith set has no member other than
A.

But arguably the Approval choice is more democratic than the Majority
choice, especially if a democracy is supposed to be for the benefit of ALL
the people, not just the magical 51%.

That's why I changed my tune recently and started advocating the Approval
winner unabashedly (for elections based on these kinds of ballots).

The expression "Tyranny of the Majority" does not refer to some imaginary
problem.  In multiwinner elections, Proportional Representation helps to
solve that problem. In single winner elections Approval Voting helps to
solve that problem.

After covering the chapter on social choice in our Math 105 text book, I
asked my students to write an essay defending their choice of voting
method. One student wrote that her choice was "majority rule" because that
was the American Way period (end of essay).

Did she learn lesson 1 of Political Science 101 ?

Forest

On Thu, 3 May 2001 DEMOREP1 at aol.com wrote:

> Mr. Simmons wrote in part-
> 
> Thanks for the example Bart. I had found a similar one myself. But I'm not
> convinced that the majority candidate is more democratic than the median
> candidate, just as I am not convinced that the majority candidate is
> better than the Approval candidate.
> ---
> D- Political Science 101 - Lesson 1 
> 
> Democracy is majority rule, by definition (as compared to minority rule 
> monarchy (rule by 1) or oligarchy (rule by more than 1 but less than a 
> majority) (regardless of the *intensity* of anybody's vote).
> 
>