[EM] the "meaning" of a vote (or lack thereof)

[Jonathan Lundell]

On Aug 26, 2011, at 1:17 PM, Juho Laatu wrote:

> On 24.8.2011, at 2.07, fsimmons at pcc.edu wrote:
> 
>> But back to a possible generic meaning of a score or cardinal rating:  if you think that candidate X would 
>> vote like you on a random issue with probability p percent, then you could give candidate X a score that 
>> is p percent of the way between the lowest and highest possible range values.
>> 
>> Note that this meaning is commensurable across the electorate.
> 
> This is the best proposal so far since this takes us as far as offering commensurable ratings. Maybe we should add also voter specific weights to the different issues.
> 
> Voters could start from the set of issues that the representative body or single representative covered during the last term. They could adjust those issues a bit to get a list of issues that are likely to emerge during the next term. That makes a list that is the same to all (and that makes the opinions therefore commensurable). Weighting makes the results more meaningful since to some voters some questions might be critical and others might be irrelevant. Without the weights the ratings might not reflect the preference order since we might have misbalance due to too many questions of one kind or due to questions of varying importance.
> 
> In principle one could collect the opinions also indirectly by generating an explicit list of issues and asking voters to mark their opinion an weight on each issue. That list could be structured or allow voters to indicate the importance of each group of questions. It is however not obvious how the questions should be grouped. Grouping could also influence the results. It would be also difficult to the voter to estimate the level of overlap between different issues. In practice one may get equally good results by simply asking "how much do you think you will agree with this candidate (from 100% to 0%)".

I'm repeating myself here, sorry, but...

1. Why isn't this replacing one ineffable candidate utility with n ineffable issue-agreement utilities (where each issue utility is the (signed) issue weight)? 

2. One doesn't vote for a candidate strictly on predetermined issues. You don't know which issues will arise in the next 2-4-6-whatever years, and the work of an elected official (a president in particular, but also other offices) consists of more than voting on issues.

3. What's an issue? Take the category of energy policy. Carbon tax? Trading credits? Nuclear energy (and its dozens of sub-issues)? Vehicle efficiency? Corn subsidies? Climate-change implications? Lots more, and not all orthogonal.