I basically don’t buy the Condorcet winner argument, mostly because the utility and disutility of winning or losing isn’t fixed. This is one of the reasons why I like score voting (or range voting) so much; candidates who are massively disliked lose heavily, whereas candidates who are broadly liked win, and from the candidate’s point for view, increasing your score in the eyes of anyone is useful, regardless of their score for other candidates.
Yes, there are concerns about comparing utilities across people, but people tend to be pretty reasonable about this in the score voting framework. (It’s strategic to give your favorite a 10, and your least favorite a 0, but empirically people often compress their scores much more, say giving everyone a rating between 6 and 8, which implicitly makes their vote a fifth as strong.) The main problem is when you add candidates who make differences so large that it dwarfs all other variation (at least among voters who think they have tiered preferences). That is, suppose you have an “Anyone But Trump” voter; their vote that maximizes the chance of someone besides Trump winning is to give Trump a 0 and every other candidate a 10. But now whether Clinton or Kasich wins depends mostly on the people who thought Trump was ok (or it was worth putting Kasich in the “as bad as Trump” camp). This is probably fine for the rare election where there’s a surprise Trump, and is not great if there’s always a Trump-like candidate running.
It’s strategic to give your favorite a 10, and your least favorite a 0, but empirically people often compress their scores much more, say giving everyone a rating between 6 and 8, which implicitly makes their vote a fifth as strong
Can you say more about this? I would expect that it wouldn’t take many competitive elections before most people would be submitting votes that are as strong as possible.
I would expect that it wouldn’t take many competitive elections before most people would be submitting votes that are as strong as possible.
That seems right; the surprising thing is that people are willing to ‘undervote’ at all, and that they do so deliberately instead of through ignorance. But it makes sense, especially for downballet candidates where you vaguely suspect parks commissioner candidate A is better than B but don’t want to put your full force behind A (because if other people are well-informed on the parks commissioner race, you want them to settle it).
Beyond ignorance, altruism sometimes motivates this, which is easiest to see for simple things like picking what restaurant to go to. If you’re mostly indifferent between them but have a weak preference, it makes sense to do a compressed vote if you suspect other people might have strong preferences that you don’t want to overwhelm.
I basically don’t buy the Condorcet winner argument, mostly because the utility and disutility of winning or losing isn’t fixed. This is one of the reasons why I like score voting (or range voting) so much; candidates who are massively disliked lose heavily, whereas candidates who are broadly liked win, and from the candidate’s point for view, increasing your score in the eyes of anyone is useful, regardless of their score for other candidates.
Yes, there are concerns about comparing utilities across people, but people tend to be pretty reasonable about this in the score voting framework. (It’s strategic to give your favorite a 10, and your least favorite a 0, but empirically people often compress their scores much more, say giving everyone a rating between 6 and 8, which implicitly makes their vote a fifth as strong.) The main problem is when you add candidates who make differences so large that it dwarfs all other variation (at least among voters who think they have tiered preferences). That is, suppose you have an “Anyone But Trump” voter; their vote that maximizes the chance of someone besides Trump winning is to give Trump a 0 and every other candidate a 10. But now whether Clinton or Kasich wins depends mostly on the people who thought Trump was ok (or it was worth putting Kasich in the “as bad as Trump” camp). This is probably fine for the rare election where there’s a surprise Trump, and is not great if there’s always a Trump-like candidate running.
Can you say more about this? I would expect that it wouldn’t take many competitive elections before most people would be submitting votes that are as strong as possible.
That seems right; the surprising thing is that people are willing to ‘undervote’ at all, and that they do so deliberately instead of through ignorance. But it makes sense, especially for downballet candidates where you vaguely suspect parks commissioner candidate A is better than B but don’t want to put your full force behind A (because if other people are well-informed on the parks commissioner race, you want them to settle it).
Beyond ignorance, altruism sometimes motivates this, which is easiest to see for simple things like picking what restaurant to go to. If you’re mostly indifferent between them but have a weak preference, it makes sense to do a compressed vote if you suspect other people might have strong preferences that you don’t want to overwhelm.