At 06:00 AM 3/5/2007, Jobst Heitzig wrote: >Do you mean to say that the will of a consistent faction of 49% of the >electorate, who will never get their way under a majoritarian system, >is "noise"??
No. But that condition is essentially impossible. There is *never* a consistent faction of that size in a majoritarian democracy, indeed, I think I wrote, there is no faction of *any* size of which this is true, since the vast majority of choices made in real societies enjoy almost total consensus. Let me put it this way. I've worked as a prison chaplain. Even thieves believe that theft is wrong. I never met one who thought it should be legalized. They may think that they, personally, were justified in some way, but that's another matter. So when you are talking about a faction which "will never get their way," you are talking about a narrow subset of the choices that the society makes, those which are controversial. And there is no consistency about this. Everyone wins sometimes and loses sometimes. Everyone. The "noise" was introducing some random process whereby collective decisions were sometimes made against the will and without the permission of the majority. That random process is the noise. ---- election-methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
