On Jan 27, 2010, at 7:02 AM, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
At 08:10 PM 1/26/2010, Juho wrote:
The scenario that you described requires some goodwill among the
voters.
That's correct. We seem to imagine that better voting systems will
produce better results even if people continue to lack goodwill and
cooperative spirit. It's a fantasy. There are structural changes
that will encourage the seeking of consensus, but voting methods are
only a tiny part of that.
I think also the strong tradition of trying to develop methods that
have as good performance as possible even when voters are competitive
and strategic is a good and healthy tradition. An ideal method might
achieve even better results when voters want to cooperate without
sacrificing the performance with strategic votes. Or if the
environment is non-competitive then one could use also methods that
rely on the required sincerity of all voters.
In typical
political environments good poll information including approvals and
ratings is thus a positive thing, but it may still be necessary to
assume that strong competition is not uncommon in the actual election
and prepare for that.
Yes. I do suggest Bucklin. Most voters will bullet vote, it's very
likely, but, then, use it as a primary in a runoff system, which
provides a very specific meaning to the lowest approved rank: I
prefer the election of this candidate to holding a runoff. It's an
absolute, sincere vote that is strategically maximal! Because that
is exactly the effect it has, monotonically.
Bucklin + runoff might indeed work better than e.g. plain Approval
(and plain Plurality of course) (assuming that the increased
complexity is not seen as a big problem).
Juho
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