[EM] In political elections C (in terms of serious candidates w. an a priori strong chance of election) will never get large!

[David L Wetzell]

On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 11:58 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
km_elmet at lavabit.com> wrote:

> On 05/29/2013 12:15 AM, David L Wetzell wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> On Tue, May 28, 2013 at 4:36 PM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm
>> <km_elmet at lavabit.com <mailto:km_elmet at lavabit.com>> wrote:
>>
>>     On 05/27/2013 09:19 PM, David L Wetzell wrote:
>>
>>         Smith's http://rangevoting.org/__**PuzzIgnoredInfo.html<http://rangevoting.org/__PuzzIgnoredInfo.html>
>>
>>         <http://rangevoting.org/**PuzzIgnoredInfo.html<http://rangevoting.org/PuzzIgnoredInfo.html>
>> >
>>
>>         needs to be taken w. a grain of salt.
>>
>>         The short-comings of IRV depend on the likely number of serious
>>         candidates whose a priori odds of winning, before one assigns
>>         voter-utilities, are strong.  If real life important single-winner
>>         political elections have economies of scale in running a serious
>>         election then it's reasonable to expect only 1, 2 or 3 (maybe 4
>>         once in
>>         a blue moon) candidates to have a priori, no matter what
>>         election rule
>>         gets used, serious chance to win, while the others are at best
>>         trying to
>>         move the center on their key issues and at worse potential
>>         spoilers in a
>>         fptp election.
>>
>>
>>     That argument is too strong in the sense that it can easily be
>>     modified to lead to any conclusion you might wish. And it can be
>>     modified thus because it is too vague.
>>
>>
>> Hi Karl, good to hear from you again.  I doubt economies of scale args
>> are completely flexible and the evidence need not be as rigorously
>> presented when one is initially communicating ideas.
>>
>
> Who is Karl?


My apologies.   I'm not always good w. names.

>
>
>      Let me be more precise. You may claim that if there're some
>>     economies of scale, then it's reasonable to only expect 1, 2 or 3
>>     viable candidates. But here's a problem. Without any data, you can
>>     posit that the economies of scale kick in at just the right point to
>>     make 2.5-party rule inevitable even under Condorcet, say. But
>>     without any data, I could just as well posit that the economies of
>>     scale, if any, kick in at n = 1000; or, I could claim that the
>>     economies of scale kick in at n = 2 and thus we don't need anything
>>     more than Plurality in the first place[1].
>>
>>
>> No, because non-competitive candidates still serve a useful purpose even
>> if their odds of winning are low.  And a non-plurality election is
>> harder to game, as illustrated by the GOP's 40-yr use of a nixonian-
>> Southern Strategy of pitting poor whites against minorities when
>> outsiders are given voice to reframe wedge issues that tilt the de facto
>> center away from the true political center.
>>
>
> So you say the non-competitive candidates still serve a purpose. But your
> economics-of-scale argument only considered competitive candidates.


dlw: Right, because it doesn't take as much to run as a non-competitive
candidate who draws attention to issue(s) or group(s) of voters...


> Call the set of competitive candidates X, and the set of noncompetitive
> candidates "that still matter", Y. Then I could just as easily apply your
> objection so that it argues in favor of advanced methods, too. I just say
> that even if you're right about economics of scale for X, that says nothing
> about the relative size of Y under IRV with respect to Y under an advanced
> method.
>

dlw: So you're saying not only there'd be a bigger X, but there'd be a more
bigger Y with a better alternative than IRV???  I will concede that it may
be true that E[N[X] | non-IRV alternative to FPTP] > E[N[X] | IRV] but I
don't think the magnitude of the diff would that great due to the economies
of scale in running a serious campaign in an important single-winner
election.  Or, I don't swee why E[N[Y]+N[X] | non-IRV] >E[N[Y]+N[X] | IRV],
though I do believe E[N[Y] | IRV or (most) non-IRV] >> E[N[Y] | FPTP].  A
candidate in Y with a small but devoted base would still have a good chance
of her/his base being swing voters with IRV as opposed to another election
rule..., but not FPTP, unless (s)he tells them to vote strategically prior
to the election but that is generally not done.

>
> The problem with the argument is that it's very hard indeed to construct a
> simple model that considers Plurality inadequate, IRV good enough, and the
> advanced methods wasteful, yet can't also be tuned to either consider
> Plurality adequate or IRV inadequate. The model has to be complex or the
> parameters finely adjusted, and complex models without evidence have little
> value.
>
>
>      So one may claim that "important single-winner political elections"
>>     necessarily have economies to scale that make anything beyond
>>     2.5-party rule exceedingly unlikely. But without data, that's claim
>>     isn't worth anything. And without data that can't be explained as
>>     confusing P(multipartyism) with P(multipartyism | political dynamics
>>     given by Plurality), the simpler hypothesis, namely that there is no
>>     such barrier that we know of, holds by default.
>>
>>
>> How about economics?  There exists X a cost of running a competitive
>> campaign.  There exists Y a reward, not per se all economic, for winning
>> a campaign.  There exists P a probability of winning.  P is roughly
>> inversely proportional to the number of competitive candidates, albeit
>> less for the last candidate to decide to compete.  If there exists N
>> likely competitive candidates then if the calculation is k*Y/(N+1)<X
>> holds, w. k<1, for the N+1 candidate, who then chooses not to run, it
>> implies that N>(kY-X)/X.   A better election rule might increase k some,
>> but arguably X will also tend to be higher for the less well-known
>> candidate, regardless of the election rule used.
>>
>> So I agree that the average number of competittive candidates can be
>> increased by the use of a different single-winner election rule, but
>> with limits due to the other aspects of running an election and how a
>> single-winner election tends to discourage too many from putting a lot
>> into running for the office.
>>
>
> Then I set (assume, claim) k high enough that the stability Condorcet
> (etc) provides is worth it. You set k low enough that it isn't, and then we
> sit on each our numbers and claim that our k is right and the other one's k
> is wrong.
>

dlw: Your point is the need for empirical evidence to constrain k.  You'd
agree that k is likely bounded by 1, or probably something less than one
because if the last potentially competitive candidate were more competitive
then (s)he might more likely induce another candidate to withdraw or dial
back their campaign?

I would counter that another approach would be to talk to professional
politicians and/or campaign managers who understand a thing or two about
electoral methods and get their informed opinions.

>
> Or, I lower X by saying that extreme expense of current US presidential
> elections is caused by Plurality rather than being a prior constraint. It
> might be even more specific: the political dynamics given by United States
> history plus the third-party exclusion of Plurality combine to make
> presidential races extremely expensive. For instance, IIRC, the televised
> debates only include parties that have a chance of winning, and parties
> that don't get into the debates are fighting at a severe disadvantage, so
> it becomes very important to signal from the very start that one's own
> party is viable, which is extremely costly[1].
>

dlw: Agreed that there is a red queen effect and that the system has been
rigged, possibly not so much out of fear that third party candidates would
win but that they'd force new issues into the public square and/or make the
two major parties look bad.  But at the end of the day, there's a large
population and it's costly to reach that many people, which is why
Nader-types hopes were more to get the Democratic party to move to the
left.

But this is kind of besides the point, since the mean number of competitive
candidates in the US has been less than 2 and we're talking about whether
it could get considerably higher with serious institutional changes and a
better electoral rule.  I agree there's likely considerable scope for
increasing E[N[Y]] and that this would be a very good thing.  The natural
scope for increasing E[N[X]] is what we disagree on and this does matter
for the relative value between IRV and non-IRV as improvements over FPTP.


> I could also then point at other nations, either other presidential
> countries making use of runoff (to strengthen the first claim), or other
> presidential countries in general, even those under Plurality (to
> strengthen the second), and say that the expense of presidential elections
> in the US is pretty much unequaled elsewhere in the world. That is, I think
> it is, but I'm not going to investigate in detail unless I know you won't
> pull the "it's different in the US than in every one of those other
> countries" response.
>

dlw: I'm not sure I'm tracking which are your two different claims.

As you know, I believe runoff elections are not pure single-winner
elections, since the first stage is a multi-winner election.  And so some
of our diffs come from a different taxonomy for election rules.

Also, I don't want to conflate this debate over the number of competitive
candidates with the other debate about a two-party (or one-party) dominated
system vs a multi-party system.  The competitive candidates can be from the
same party, since there are different factions within parties, especially
in a two-party dominated system.

>
> But most likely of all, I'd say: "economics of scale? Please robustly show
> that they exist within politics. Then show that the real world parameters
> are so as to strengthen your position, rather than the position of
> Plurality supporters or of advanced-method supporters".


dlw: I don't know what you mean by "robustly".  Probably something with
extensive data and or surveys of candidates/campaign managers?
It's easy to put the burden of proof on others and given the lack of use of
"advanced-methods"  in serious political elections, there's no real
evidence.

My position is that even if the economies of scale are manipulated by the
use of FPTP and other tricks and what-not, that doesn't mean there wouldn't
still remain economies of scale in trying to win a non-runoff single-winner
election with a large number of voters.  This doesn't deny the need for
electoral reform, it just mitigates the vaunted value-added of
"advanced-methods" over IRV.

>
>
>      And, if you're not claiming that there is such economics of scale,
>>     but simply that there *might* be, then it's still less risky to
>>     assume multipartyism is right and use an advanced method. If we're
>>     wrong, nothing lost but "momentum". If we're right, we avoid getting
>>     stuck at something that would still seriously misrepresent the
>>     wishes of the people.
>>
>>
>>   Well, I am claiming there exists inherent economies of scale in
>> single-winner elections such that the number of competitive candidates
>> are likely to have a fuzzy ceiling apart from the specific election rule
>> used, and that single-partyism/multipartyism is a function of the mix of
>> single-winner and fair multi-winner election rules used.  My implication
>> of the first is that it relativizes the import of alternative
>> single-winner election rules for political elections and thereby
>> elevates the import of marketing/first-mover advantage in the
>> replacement of FPTP.
>>
>
> Again, without data, there's no reason to set the parameters at your sweet
> spot as opposed to somebody else's sweet spot. So the most reasonable
> approach would be to not claim there is a sweet spot (or economics of scale
> or whatnot) until otherwise can be shown.
>

dlw: Or the reasonable approach is to allow for different priors in the
absence of evidence and to attribute our support for IRV vs non-IRV to our
different priors.  My view is that the quality of the candidates in X is
likely to be improved more on than the expected number of candidates in X.


>
> ----
>
> [1] And the same dynamic is replicated within the parties out of need to
> be seen as winnable in the general election. For instance, Romney paying
> $1M on TV ads and busing to get his supporters to the Iowa poll in 2007 can
> be explained in this context. He had to show himself as winnable to win the
> primaries and in turn have a chance at the general election. Warren Smith
> has made arguments in this direction.
>

I agree that FPTP exacerbates the economies of scale.   IRV alone won't
undo all of that, but it'd make it easier since candidates in Y who could
be upgraded to X won't be as threatening to candidates in X.
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