[EM] Methods

[matt welland]

On Mon, 2011-10-17 at 00:19 +0100, Kevin Venzke wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> --- En date de : Dim 16.10.11, matt welland <matt at kiatoa.com> a écrit :
> > > It has been shown, here, and in journal articles, that
> > Approval will
> > > soon home in on the CW. After a few
> > > elecions. But "a few elections" can be a decade or
> > more. We'd like
> > > better results before that, and so
> > 
> > Does this prediction of "a few" elections account for polls
> > typically
> > done over and over prior to the election also being done
> > with approval?
> > My hunch is that Approval would have an immediate
> > disruptive (in a good
> > way) impact if the accompanying polls were also approval.
> 
> I completely agree with that. Swap "a few elections" with "a few 
> polling iterations" and you should be where you wanted.
> 
> Approval's weakness is that it has to decide where the main contest is
> prior to the vote. If there are few good options (i.e. any pair of
> frontrunners leaves a large percentage of voters approving neither) or 
> too many good options (i.e. several likely candidates for sincere CW) a
> rank method, with its "higher resolution," may be able to fish out a
> better result.

Hmmm... It seems to me that both those scenarios actually say something
useful and even possibly important about the election results that would
be lost in a ranked election.

Assuming that a) decent information about the candidates has been
available via news, web and debates and b) reasonable quality approval
polls have been conducted prior to the election then:

In the case where there are too few good options then clearly the
candidates do not represent a good cross section of the values and
criteria considered important to the people or the people are are too
diverse to be easily represented. This is not a problem that can be
solved by an election system. All a ranked system would do is hide the
issue and choose some candidate that clearly a large portion of the
population would not be happy with.

In the case where there are many good options then approval is exposing
that fact. It is true that this scenario makes strategic voting more
important but since we are assuming that decent information and prior
polling is available I think voters can apply a pretty simple strategy
to decide if it is safe to not vote for the front runner they don't
really like. Assuming a party or conservative/liberal philosophical
split then if the candidate they do like is ahead of the leading
candidate in the opposing camp then they can safely not vote for the
front runner in their camp they don't like. Hard to explain but trivial
once understood. 

Again, I think it is very, very important to note that the ranked
systems actually lose or hide information relative to approval in both
these cases.

Note that in the first case the results and impact of a ranked system
are actually worse than the results of approval. The political pressure
to converge and appeal to a broad spectrum is greater under approval
than the ranked systems. The evaluation of a voting system only makes
sense in the context of all the other things going on in a society. The
pressure on politicians to actually meet the needs of the people is a
massively important factor and ranked systems appear to wash out some of
that force which is a very bad thing IMHO.

In the second case a ranked system *might* select a "more preferred"
candidate but if you have several candidates all getting 75% approval
then really, do you (pragmatically speaking) care which one gets chosen?
I think we'd all be thrilled to have that problem. If we did have that
problem you can be assured that not only would most people be reasonably
happy with the outcome but there would almost certainly be open and
intelligent dialog on moving to a ranked system - something that can
never happen under plurality. In other words approval is the gateway
drug to the really good stuff, a ranked system of some sort (*).

Matt
-=-
(*) I personally suspect there is no need to go to a ranked system as
there are lots of good people who would make a great leader, all that is
needed is to keep who ever gets chosen fully accountable to the people,
something that approval appears to do better than any other system.

> Kevin Venzke
> 
> ----
> Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info