[EM] Is it professional?

[Juho Laatu]

On 25.6.2013, at 1.25, Benjamin Grant wrote:

> On Mon, Jun 24, 2013 at 6:19 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <km_elmet at lavabit.com> wrote:
> Scenario 1: Voters don't rank now, but will rank when they see it's worth it. Here IRV will eventually crash but BTR-IRV is, well, better.
> 
> Scenario 2: Voters rank, contrary to your assumptions (but suggested by international evidence). Again, BTR-IRV does better.
> 
> Scenario 3: Voters don't rank and never will. BTR-IRV is here no worse than IRV.
> 
> Under what scenario does BTR-IRV *lose* against ordinary IRV?
> 
> I am quite interested in the answer to this as well, as I imagine that whatever the answer is is a defining advantage, should any exist.

One can see this problem from two quite different points of view.

One approach is that BTR-IRV is simply an improved version of IRV that it avoids some of the key problems of IRV. Therefore it could be straight forward to get also BTR-IRV accepted if the society accepts IRV.

Another approach is to have a more political power oriented viewpoint. IRV tends to favour major parties. If the incumbent strong parties (that do have a lot to say on what route the politics take) may well count their chances in each proposed method. This might lead to favouring methods like IRV that still allow the largest parties to take a lion's share of the victories.

A classical example is one where there are two major parties and a smaller compromise party candidate between the lajor party candidates. Should the mathod allow that compromise candidate win? Condorcet compliant methods seem to think that the compromise candidate should win. (I also note that different political systems may have different needs. In some systems the strongest are expected to rule whil in others compromises are the default mode of operation.)

Juho



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