I have a friend who gets daughter dressed for preschool every morning by presenting her with exactly two complete outfits, and then telling her to "choose". Apparently after making a choice, the girl is more likely to accept getting dressed without a fight, and so far hasn't demanded a third option. Sound familiar?
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I've been thinking about what happens when voter motivations are not strictly utilitarian. Suppose, for example, voters of one party react to a "scary" opponent by gravitating toward the opposite extreme, even though a more moderate choice would be expected to have a better chance of winning. This may well be the innate human reaction, much as a frightened animal in a windowed enclosure will repeatedly dash itself against the glass rather than stop and search for a less obvious means of escape.
This could actually be self-reinforcing, since voters of the opposite party might then react to the first group's extremism by rallying even more strongly toward "scary" candidate who triggered the situation in the first place. This process would continue back and forth until the electorate was completely polarized. [Sound familiar?]
Not even Condorcet-compliant methods would be immune to distortion under this scenario. Antagonized voters might tend to rank an extremist at the top of the ballot, and bury the feared opponent. By implication, the "rational" Condorcet candidate would suffer as voters migrate toward more extreme "champions", and unknown candidates would benefit by not being ranked last. Approval voting would probably be the least affected by polarization, since the ballots don't contain room for exaggeration (either sincere or calculated).
On the other hand, this kind of voter response is not necessarily irrational--if a voter thinks that the country has been moving too far to the right of the political spectrum, he may try to compensate by supporting someone from the extreme left in an attempt to balance things out. Merrill & Grofman actually consider strategies of this type in their book, "A Unified Theory of Voting".
I've been kicking this one around for a while, but haven't had time to research or develop it further. Does anyone know of any other work along these lines?
Bart ---- Election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
