A1 Refereed original research article in a scientific journal

What makes the winner in voting?




AuthorsNurmi, Hannu

PublisherVerlag Holler

Publication year2024

JournalMunich social science review

Article number3

Volume7

First page 45

Last page60

ISSN0170-2521

eISSN0170-2521


Abstract

 All voting procedures are based on some intuitive idea of winning. The rivalry between two intuitive notions of what constitutes the winning candidates or policy alternatives has been present in the social choice literature from its Golden Age, i.e. in the late 18'th century. Given a profile of voter preferences over a set of alternatives, the voting rules specify the set of winners. It turns out there are profiles where the specified outcomes differ widely from each other. Thus, the voting outcome depends heavily on the rules adopted.  The positional systems (like the Borda count) suffer from extreme variability of election outcomes in subsets of alternatives. Pairwise systems (like Copeland's rule) are subject to variability of outcomes in subsets of the electorate and to paradoxes in variable electorates. Several attempts to combine pairwise and positional intuitions in voting rules have been discussed over the past decades. We discuss some of them here.

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Last updated on 2025-27-01 at 19:34