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

[Juho Laatu]

On 27.8.2011, at 2.13, Jonathan Lundell wrote:

> 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)? 

Maybe because the voter answers question "how often do you agree" instead of "how strongly do you agree". Time and number of occurrences are commensurable but voters' interpretations of the chemical and physical reactions in their brain and heart are not (maybe one approach would be to use some instruments to measure brain and heart activity with some external device :-) ). With weights added the question continues "... and estimate the importance of those agreements". This is based purely on personal feelings as taken from the brain and heart, but that should not destroy commensurability since all the voters are still on the commensurable scale from 100% agreement to 0% agreement, and the voters are still supposed to answer question "how often, if all issues would get the time that they deserve".

The n issues could be all binary decisions, "agree" or "disagree". In that case they are commensurable. If they are more complex, e.g. numeric decisions, then the voter must estimate the level of agreement somehow. Maybe the voter should decide on some hard limits to what is agreeable and then decide which candidates agree with him and which ones do not. Also numeric differences would do. This way we can (at least in principle) escape the non-commensurable "strength of agreement" questions.

> 
> 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.

Yes, but the set-up is the same for all voters. Voters will make wrong guesses on what will happen during the next term, but in principle they will all answer the same commensurable question and their answers will approximate this ideal.

> 
> 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.

Yes, all these. I addressed the orthogonality problem shortly by noting that the questions may overlap. When the voter estimates the weights he must also take into account the problems of overlapping. If the voter thinks there are two important questions, A and B, and there are three questions, "A ok?", "B ok?" and "B' ok?", then the voter should estimate the weights so that the answer there was only one B related question. The best way to do this is maybe just to ask the voter to give his best guess on the frequency of agreement with each candidate on questions that the voter considers important. Note that the answers would be commensurable even if the questions would overlap and not be orthogonal. That would just make the answers less useful for the purposes of stating one's opinion on who should be elected.

Juho



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