[EM] inaccurate Fargo approval voting results

[Toby Pereira]

 I'm going to reply at the top again even though things go out of order, because Yahoo makes it difficult to tell who's written what when I post below.
The decrease after the first election could just be because the new candidates naively think that they will suddenly have a shot at winning or getting close, and then finding out that it's not as simple as that, so they don't stand in subsequent elections. Without testing it out, we don't know that the same wouldn't also happen under Condorcet, Approval, STAR etc.
Toby
    On Tuesday 11 June 2024 at 17:13:23 BST, Closed Limelike Curves <closed.limelike.curves at gmail.com> 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.
There's a low rate of empirical pathologies after an election or two, once politicians have learned how the system works. ERRG studied this 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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