[EM] another reason to avoid strategic motivations

Jonathan Lundell jlundell at pobox.com
Mon Dec 1 17:17:48 PST 2008


...or at least to avoid methods that encourage strategic voting, is  
that voters are so bad at it.

I blogged a rather dismaying study the other day on the subject of  
people's tendency to irrationally misjudge probabilities when they  
have a stake in the outcome. I wouldn't want to draw too close a  
parallel between this and any particular election method. Rather, it's  
something to keep in mind when we talk about voters trying to make  
strategic calculations that they're not really competent, in general,  
to make.

Notice also that there's a systematic bias; it's not just that the  
subjects are wrong in a random way that might tend to cancel out.


http://pragmatos.net/2008/11/29/pessimistic-voters/



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