[EM] Juho, unexplanable strategy attitudes

[Juho]

On Feb 27, 2007, at 17:36 , Michael Ossipoff wrote:

> I don’t know what you mean by “attitudes”.

I gave two rather extreme attitude examples (with the intention to  
define the discussion space)
1) "In some countries strategic voting may be taken as granted and  
voters may expect to be given recommendations on how to apply the  
most efficient strategies"
2) "In some other countries recommending strategic voting would be  
seen as an attempt of fraud and voters would immediately change their  
opinion of that candidate"

> Juho says:
>
> My learning is that it would be good to always state one's  
> assumptions clearly.
>
> I reply:
>
> That particular statement itself could be a bit clearer. If you   
> believe that I didn’t state an assumption that I should have  
> stated, then shouldn’t you say what it is?

In the next sentence of my mail I tried to answer this question on my  
behalf:
"My tradition is more on the second scenario side, but I try to cover  
also varying levels of strategy centric thinking"

My comments on the discussed winning votes and margins examples were  
based on assuming an environment where strategies are used very  
extensively but not by all voters (some even got irritated when  
others used strategies trying to beat their favourite). I however  
assumed that people would prefer (and be happy with) sincere voting  
to extensive use of strategies, i.e. there would be not interest in  
strategic voting unless it would give them clear benefits or if it  
would be a clear threat to them. In short, I assumed that 1) voters  
tend to favour sincere voting but 2) many of them are ready to use  
(counter)strategies if they are forced to and 3) a considerable  
number of them are interested in using strategies to gain personal  
benefits and to "cheat the system".

I'd be interested to know if you assume some particular type of  
atmosphere in the environment in which you are eventually planning  
the discussed election methods to be used (in general or in some  
particular example). The vulnerability to strategies is stronger in  
the environment of example 1 above. I'm not sure if there are  
countries where the situation is that bad, but I know there are  
countries where many voters vote in a way that they were advised to  
(by more knowledgeable trusted people/groups).

Juho



		
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