[EM] My summary of the recent discussion

[Juho Laatu]

On 2.6.2012, at 18.19, Jameson Quinn wrote:

> 
> 2) Approval method and its strategies were once more discussed. My understanding is simply that Approval works quite fine as long as there are only one or two winnable candidates, but when there are three or more, the method pretty much fails
> 
> Fails compared to what? At its worst, approval is still better than plurality; and depending on your voting model, it could be much better (for instance, honest probabilistic approval is range, with great BR). 
> 
> Jameson

I was just thinking that it "fails to work properly".

Approval is more expressive than Plurality and it allows (small) third parties to run without becoming spoilers. But I wouldn't say that it is categorically better than Plurality since there are many needs and many uses for election methods. One difference is that Approval is a compromise oriented method while Plurality aims at electing from (and forming) large parties. If our target is to establish a two-party system, Plurality is our natural choice.

Range and Approval (if seen as one Range variant) are good for certain kind of elections. Typically we use majority based single-winner methods in competitive political environments and utility based methods when we have neutral non-competitive "judges" as voters. Also here the needs determine which method is best.

Juho



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