I still wonder about "ground rules" for a good voting system.
Shall we stipulate that the opinion of a tenured Princeton professor should count exactly the same as that of a multiply convicted felon, and that the opinion of a 17-year-old should count for nothing?
I fear that a lot of differences in how we conduct elections can be mapped back to unstated, but highly debatable, opinions.
To give an example often quoted by J. Posner, the political opinions of parents who are raising children are known to differ quite widely from the opinions of the childless. A possible result of this is social programs that stiff children and leave a lot of them in poverty - while seniors collect generous benefits.
But this is just one example of an unstated ground rule that can be challenged.
In the news today we see Sarah Palin and Mark Begich going after each other on who would be the stronger opponent for Peltola ... if only we had the ranked-choice date on Begich vs Peltola ... sigh
You might be interested in Levin and Nalebuff (1995) who compared different election systems using British Union election data. "An interesting feature of these British elections is that voters are required to rank the candidates. As a result, knowing the voter ranking, we can simulate elections under a variety of electoral systems. It is perhaps remarkable that among the 30 elections we examined, with the exception of plurality rule and single transferable vote, none of the other seven alternatives considered gave a different top choice (see later section). The systems differed in the rankings of the lower candidates. This empirical regularity suggests a connection to some recent theoretical work (Caplin and Nalebuff, 1988, 1991): when voter preferences are sufficiently similar, a variety of voting systems lead to similar choices, and these choices have desirable properties."
Recently, I've come to appreciate some of the advantages of ranked choice over approval voting (specifically the latter is susceptible to electoral ambushes by small but motivated slivers of the electorate). But we shouldn't lose sight of the empirical data suggesting that anything other than plurality voting will tend to give similar results.
The measure of voting method performance is voter satisfaction efficiency. Literally the expected utility voters get.
https://electionscience.github.io/vse-sim/VSEbasic/
I still wonder about "ground rules" for a good voting system.
Shall we stipulate that the opinion of a tenured Princeton professor should count exactly the same as that of a multiply convicted felon, and that the opinion of a 17-year-old should count for nothing?
I fear that a lot of differences in how we conduct elections can be mapped back to unstated, but highly debatable, opinions.
To give an example often quoted by J. Posner, the political opinions of parents who are raising children are known to differ quite widely from the opinions of the childless. A possible result of this is social programs that stiff children and leave a lot of them in poverty - while seniors collect generous benefits.
But this is just one example of an unstated ground rule that can be challenged.
In the news today we see Sarah Palin and Mark Begich going after each other on who would be the stronger opponent for Peltola ... if only we had the ranked-choice date on Begich vs Peltola ... sigh
You might be interested in Levin and Nalebuff (1995) who compared different election systems using British Union election data. "An interesting feature of these British elections is that voters are required to rank the candidates. As a result, knowing the voter ranking, we can simulate elections under a variety of electoral systems. It is perhaps remarkable that among the 30 elections we examined, with the exception of plurality rule and single transferable vote, none of the other seven alternatives considered gave a different top choice (see later section). The systems differed in the rankings of the lower candidates. This empirical regularity suggests a connection to some recent theoretical work (Caplin and Nalebuff, 1988, 1991): when voter preferences are sufficiently similar, a variety of voting systems lead to similar choices, and these choices have desirable properties."
Recently, I've come to appreciate some of the advantages of ranked choice over approval voting (specifically the latter is susceptible to electoral ambushes by small but motivated slivers of the electorate). But we shouldn't lose sight of the empirical data suggesting that anything other than plurality voting will tend to give similar results.