[EM] Student government - what voting system to recommend?

[Michael Poole]

Abd ul-Rahman Lomax writes:

> 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?

It generally breaks down when a voter no longer has a strong enough
personal connection to a large enough fraction of the others involved.
That threshold varies from person to person, and probably from time to
time and from subject to subject.

The same kind of breakdown happens in many online interactions: it is
easy for a person to be extremely rude to someone whom he has never
met, especially if the audience does not contain many people whose
opinions of him are important to him.

A similar breakdown is well-documented in mob behavior, where the
actions of an individual may be quite different when he is anonymous
than when he is known or memorable to the victims of his behavior.

There will always be some people whose behavior is consistently
honest, repulsive, or whatever else, but a large majority of people
are swayed by peer pressure -- even the potential or imaginary kinds.

Michael Poole