[EM] inaccurate Fargo approval voting results

[Closed Limelike Curves]

>
> I'm not completely convinced by this. I doubt most potential candidates
> are experts in voting method theory, and if there has been a low rate of
> empirical pathologies, then they won't know about it from real-life
> elections either.

There's a low rate of empirical pathologies after an election or two, once
politicians have learned how the system works. ERRG studied this
<https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/reports/rcv-impact-on-candidate-entry-and-representation/>
and found a big increase in the number of candidates in the first election
after IRV, but the effect disappears by the next election. This is actually
pretty interesting, because as we know the equilibria for
plurality-with-primaries and IRV are almost identical; it suggests elites
are testing out new strategies like promoting more moderate contenders,
then quickly abandoning them after they've realized that IRV and the
current system are essentially the same.

It takes time for party elites and donors to learn they have to switch
strategies—e.g. avoid blowing money on extremists in Condorcet
elections, recruit more moderate candidates, reach out to second-preference
voters. But, because IRV and plurality-with-primary have the same
equilibrium strategies, there's no need to learn a new strategy for IRV.
Elites act the same way they always have, which is to say that the moderate
candidates never get any kind of funding or attention under IRV, just like
under our current system.

On Sun, Jun 9, 2024 at 2:51 PM Toby Pereira <tdp201b at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:

> I'm not completely convinced by this. I doubt most potential candidates
> are experts in voting method theory, and if there has been a low rate of
> empirical pathologies, then they won't know about it from real-life
> elections either. I don't see any reason why "moderate" candidates
> (presumably those in the centre) will automatically get fewer first place
> votes than the "extreme" candidates in any case. Most people won't know of
> the practical differences between Condorcet and IRV, so if the Condorcet
> winner is almost always elected under IRV anyway, I don't see that it will
> affect candidate behaviour that much.
>
> Toby
>
> On Sunday 9 June 2024 at 18:50:26 BST, Closed Limelike Curves <
> closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> The reason IRV looks like it "basically works" is because its pathologies
> mean moderate and third-party candidates know they have no hope of winning,
> so they never run in the first place. At that point, in a 2-party system,
> all voting systems will return the same results (because it's just a simple
> majority vote).
>
> I think this bears repeating: *a low rate of **empirical** pathologies is
> often a negative, not positive, indicator*. If your dataset has no
> examples of center-squeeze, that means your system is so bad at electing
> Condorcet winners that moderate candidates are refusing to run in the first
> place. Similarly, we'll know Condorcet methods are working if (sincere)
> Condorcet cycles start popping up all the time. That's how we'll know we've
> successfully depolarized our politics and broken free of the old
> one-dimensional political spectrum (where the median voter theorem protects
> us from cycles).
>
>
>
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