Re: [EM] IA/MPO
Hi Forest, De : Forest Simmons fsimm...@pcc.edu On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 9:23 AM, Kevin Venzke step...@yahoo.fr wrote: Hi Forest, Unfortunately, I realized that an SFC problem is possibly egregious: 51 AB 49 CB B would win easily, contrary to SFC (which disallows both B and C). But more alarmingly it's a majority favorite problem. So it is non-majoritarian in the same sense that Approval is. In this case the count is too close for approval voters to drop their second preferences, so B will be the Approval winner. Of course with perfect information, they would bullet, and A would win. Philosophically, in this situation I sympathize with electing the candidate broader support (the consensus candidate) over the mere majority favorite, which is why Approval's failure of (one version of) the Majority Criterion has never bothered me. Well, as an Approval scenario this is pretty inexplicable. It suggests to me that the pre-election polling is not working. There should generally be two frontrunners, but both A and C factions are voting as though their favorite is not one of the two. That's odd to the point that I don't know how to say who should win based purely on the ballots. In a rank ballot setting, where you can see the majority, I think there's a risk of that majority complaining about the outcome and asking for a different method to be adopted. Jobst and I have gone to a lot of trouble to contrive methods that make B the game theoretic winner in the face of such preferences. I'm sure you remember his challenge to find a method that makes B the perfect information game theoretic winner when utilities are given by (say) 60 A(100), B(70) 40 C(100), B(50) It seems that only lottery methods can solve this challenge in a satisfactory way. We co-authored a paper with the double entendre title of Some Chances for Consensus on this topic for the benefit of people who take the tyranny of the majority problem seriously. Yes, I read that paper. It was very interesting. It doesn't fit my perception of a proposable method, which is fine. It's just that IA/MPO, at first glance, seems pretty proposable. Not just the properties but the fact that the name is also the definition. In light of this fact I propose the following variation on our method: 1. Eliminate all candidates that have higher MPO than IA. 2. Elect the remaining candidate with the greatest difference between its IA and its MPO. I like differences better than ratios in this context, but I used ratios in IA/MPO because I worried about people who couldn't easily agree that (25 - 30) (72 - 90) , for example. But now that we know eliminating all of the negative differences is possible without eliminating all of the candidates, let's switch to differences. Well, if the elimination in step 1 recalculates MPO for step 2, you probably lose FBC. Hrm. MDDA's approach (i.e. for satisfying Majority Favorite, and SFC more broadly) is that if your MPO .5 then you mostly can't win. MAMPO's approach is that if your IA is .5 then only your MPO is considered, not your IA. I wonder if there are any other options. Both of these approaches are kind of drastic, and I don't think a method needs to completely satisfy SFC. Kevin Venzke Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
Re: [EM] Sociological issues of elections
On 10/4/2013 4:19 AM, Kristofer Munsterhjelm wrote: re: ... we shouldn't then be surprised that small scale direct democracy has its dynamics too. And I can definitely see situations where preexisting social oppression can spread into the social domain in a community where everybody knows everybody else. As I also said in another post, we've had quite some history with that in the social realm in the small towns here (in Norway). It could get quite ugly: stand out from the crowd and you would find yourself shunned and nasty gossip would start to spread about you. Fortunately, this social conformity effect is no longer as strong, among other reasons since the people who live in such places can move more easily. (And as an aside, many do. Not just because of the oppressive small town effect, but because the jobs are to be found in larger cities -- though I imagine Norway is doing better than say, Sweden, in this respect: we have a deliberate element of decentralization in our policies.) The nature of partisanship is that we seek out and align ourselves with others who share our views. The circumstances you describe show why, as groups predisposed to a particular attitude coalesce into larger groups, party systems aggregate 'preexisting social oppression'. That is why political parties are the antithesis of public interest groups. They deliberately shut out those outside their parochial view. Have any of us not met someone shunned by our acquaintances, only to find the person more sensible than we were led to expect? As our understanding and appreciation of such individuals grows, our minds tend to blur our antipathy. In time, our former opinion no longer clouds our minds and we find we have grown. We would be well advised to recall such instances because they will help us grasp the wisdom of, and the need for, a political infrastructure that arranges for those predisposed to a given attitude to be exposed to, and interact with, non-partisans, a process that broadens the horizons of the participants. In other words, instead of letting socially oppressive groups coalesce into solid blocks committed to confrontation, we must find a way to encourage disparate groups to join in the pursuit of their common interest. re: There's an intuition that direct democracy is the natural state, and that it is definitely better than representative democracy, in particular where the representative democracy does a bad job of actually representing the people. The intuition that direct democracy is the natural state would be reasonable if we lived in a state of nature. We don't. We live in an era dominated by mass communications and behavioral science, which combine into powerful tools for mass manipulation. To imagine direct democracy can exist under these circumstances is unwise. Since modern representative democracies are party-based and ... representative democracy does a bad job of actually representing the people, ought we not consider the possibility that letting political parties name the candidates for elective office is an unsound practice? Constructive resolution of political issues requires, first of all, lawmakers with the ability to recognize the value in various - sometimes competing - points of view, from the people's perspective. That is impossible for legislators elected to represent a partisan interest. However intuitive direct democracy may seem, it can not work when the means of exploiting public opinion are commonly used to gain political advantage. The effect of such mass manipulation can only be minimized by reason. If political power is to reside in the people, the political infrastructure must give the people a way to reason their way through the issues that concern them. Such deliberation has been shown, repeatedly, to be most effective in small groups. There are countless academic studies that show this point. Here are a few: * Esterling, Fung and Lee show that deliberation in small groups raises both the knowledge level of the participants and their satisfaction with the results of their deliberations. See Esterling, Kevin M., Fung, Archon and Lee, Taeku, Knowledge Inequality and Empowerment in Small Deliberative Groups: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment at the Oboe Townhalls (2011). APSA 2011 Annual Meeting Paper. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1902664 * Pogrebinschi found that ... policies for minority groups deliberated in the national conferences tend to be crosscutting as to their content. The policies tend to favor more than one group simultaneously See Pogrebinschi, Thamy, Participatory Democracy and the Representation of Minority Groups in Brazil (2011). APSA 2011 Annual Meeting Paper. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1901000 * A study by Patrick R. Laughlin, Erin C. Hatch,
Re: [EM] IA/MPO
Kevin, Let's call the method that elects the candidate with the max (non-negative) difference between IA and MPO, IA-MPO. This method satisfies FBC, Plurality, Monotonicity, and the Mono-Add-Top version of Participation. In addition it has the property that if a ballot that does not truncate the current winner is added, the new winner (if any) will be someone not truncated on the added ballot. IA-MPO fails the Majority Criterion, but the following variant satisfies the MC and therefore should be more proposable: 1. Eliminate all candidates that have greater MPO than IA. 2. Elect from among the remaining candidates one with the least MPO (not recalculating MPO's). Here's a short proof that step one does not eliminate the Implicit Approval winner: Let A be the candidate with max IA, and suppose that this max value is IA(A). Let MPO(A) be the max pairwise opposition against A, and let B be a candidate that is ranked above A on MPO(A) ballots. Then B's IA is at least MPO(A), which cannot be greater than the approval winner's IA. Therefore MPO(A) is no greater than IA(A). In other words the Implicit Approval winner is never eliminated by step one above. If I am not mistaken, this MC compliant method still satisfies the FBC, Plurality, etc. and even satisfies Mono-Add-Plump, but not Mom-Add-Top. What do you think? Forest On Fri, Oct 11, 2013 at 6:53 AM, Kevin Venzke step...@yahoo.fr wrote: Hi Forest, De : Forest Simmons fsimm...@pcc.edu On Thu, Oct 10, 2013 at 9:23 AM, Kevin Venzke step...@yahoo.fr wrote: Hi Forest, () Well, if the elimination in step 1 recalculates MPO for step 2, you probably lose FBC. Important reason to not re-calculate the MPO's Hrm. MDDA's approach (i.e. for satisfying Majority Favorite, and SFC more broadly) is that if your MPO .5 then you mostly can't win. MAMPO's approach is that if your IA is .5 then only your MPO is considered, not your IA. I wonder if there are any other options. Both of these approaches are kind of drastic, and I don't think a method needs to completely satisfy SFC. Kevin Venzke Election-Methods mailing list - see http://electorama.com/em for list info
