[EM] Chicken Dilemma--To whom is it a problem?

[Juho Laatu]

Some more thoughts on cardinal and ordinal methods in otherwords that were already used by others.

Most, if not all current political systems rely on the majority principle. If A has 60% support and B has 40% support the A supporters may not accept the idea that B supproters have stronger feelings about B>A than A supporters feel A>B. It is easier to just respect the majority opinion. It is also not possible to measure and compare the strengths of individual preferences reliably in *competitive* elections because people want their own vote to weigh at least as much as the votes of other voters. We may want the "one man one vote" principle to hold also in situations where one voter actually feels very strongly X>Y but another voter just makes a rational judgement X>Y when asked, without having any strong feelings about wich one of them will be elected. We may thus not want to give more power to the "hotheads" but want to hear also what the more moderate voters want to say.

The majority and ranking based approaches to making democratic decisions may not be perfect, but in the competitive political environments they seem to be the best working approach anyway. With rankings we can have some resonably strategy free methods that work without problems and complaints in the competive political environment.

Juho


On 20.10.2013, at 23.34, Dick Burkhart wrote:

> The problem with Condorcet, SDSC, and the like is that they ignore crucial
> information - namely, the strengths of the voters preferences of one
> candidate over another. That is how mathematician Donald Saari can argue for
> the superiority of Borda, and why others argue for cardinal voting.
> 
> 
> Dick Burkhart, Ph.D. mathematics
> 4802 S Othello St,  Seattle, WA  98118
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