a better understanding of voting theory can help make such improvements more probable.
I strongly doubt this point. The reasons that current election systems are horrendous are _not_ related to lack of academic research. The reasons are historical and social, not mathematical. The only way to get better elections is to get a better selectorate (cf raising the sanity waterline).
I _do_ think there’s a lot of value in some aspects of voting theory research, but not really having to do with political voting, more about how to combine/compare human desires: utility/preference aggregation limits and theorems.
The thing that I can imagine making theory relevant is for the vote-reform activists being in agreement on which system to strive for.
For example, my current impression is that it’s actually slightly annoying that Massachusetts passed (if I recall correctly) ranked voting, instead of approval voting (which I think makes better tradeoffs in vote-counting pragmatics and ease-of-use.)
I’m not sure what counts as theory or not, vote-counting pragmatics and ease of use are a different class of problem than “what sorts of decisions an idealized election would get the right answer on”, but it does seem like you need both the theory and the nitty-gritty pragmatics in order to decide “which voting system we’re going to push for nationwide, starting at the local level and working our way up as we build momentum.”
The thing that I can imagine making theory relevant is for the vote-reform activists being in agreement on which system to strive for.
I’m amused by the irony of vote-reform activists being thwarted by an inability to pick the best result from diverse beliefs/preferences. I strongly doubt that more research on voting theory can resolve it for activists any more than it can for the public.
But perhaps I’m wrong—there’s probably some aspects of voting BOOTSTRAP theory that bears investigation. I suspect that even that falls more into social/political science than what is commonly called “voting theory”, which is more abstract and mathematical, closer to game theory.
You might be thinking of “And the loser is… Plurality Voting” which describes a 2010 voting systems conference, where Approval Voting ended up winning the approval vote. (I do wish they had had the experts vote under a bunch of different systems, but oh well.)
Maine, not Massachusetts. Massachusetts will probably pass ranked voting in 2020, though.
“Starting at the local level and building up” is a good plan, but not the only one. For anti-gerrymandering fixes (that is, proportional representation), starting with the federal level could make sense.
Nod. But it seemed like the “start from local level and build up” was what was in fact happening, when it came to changing the voting methods themselves.
I strongly doubt this point. The reasons that current election systems are horrendous are _not_ related to lack of academic research. The reasons are historical and social, not mathematical. The only way to get better elections is to get a better selectorate (cf raising the sanity waterline).
I _do_ think there’s a lot of value in some aspects of voting theory research, but not really having to do with political voting, more about how to combine/compare human desires: utility/preference aggregation limits and theorems.
Is any form of utilitarianism anywhere close to sane? In a world with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_second_best and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem, is there _ANY_ aggregation function suitable for use in any moral calculus?
The thing that I can imagine making theory relevant is for the vote-reform activists being in agreement on which system to strive for.
For example, my current impression is that it’s actually slightly annoying that Massachusetts passed (if I recall correctly) ranked voting, instead of approval voting (which I think makes better tradeoffs in vote-counting pragmatics and ease-of-use.)
I’m not sure what counts as theory or not, vote-counting pragmatics and ease of use are a different class of problem than “what sorts of decisions an idealized election would get the right answer on”, but it does seem like you need both the theory and the nitty-gritty pragmatics in order to decide “which voting system we’re going to push for nationwide, starting at the local level and working our way up as we build momentum.”
I’m amused by the irony of vote-reform activists being thwarted by an inability to pick the best result from diverse beliefs/preferences. I strongly doubt that more research on voting theory can resolve it for activists any more than it can for the public.
But perhaps I’m wrong—there’s probably some aspects of voting BOOTSTRAP theory that bears investigation. I suspect that even that falls more into social/political science than what is commonly called “voting theory”, which is more abstract and mathematical, closer to game theory.
I think there is a paper somewhere on which voting systems win when voted on under which voting systems by voting experts.
You might be thinking of “And the loser is… Plurality Voting” which describes a 2010 voting systems conference, where Approval Voting ended up winning the approval vote. (I do wish they had had the experts vote under a bunch of different systems, but oh well.)
Maine, not Massachusetts. Massachusetts will probably pass ranked voting in 2020, though.
“Starting at the local level and building up” is a good plan, but not the only one. For anti-gerrymandering fixes (that is, proportional representation), starting with the federal level could make sense.
Nod. But it seemed like the “start from local level and build up” was what was in fact happening, when it came to changing the voting methods themselves.