Plurality, Borda Count and Preference Polarization

Sunanda Roy, Kuan Chuen Wu and Abhijit Chandra

ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics

Abstract: The paper uses the profile decomposition method which decomposes a given profile of voters into hypothetical electorates, to explain disagreement between the induced social rank orders of the candidates under plurality and the Borda count. The family of component profiles responsible for such disagreement are shown to possess a socio-economically interesting feature: In each such profile, a specific candidate is first and last ranked by an equal number of voters. A significant weight of such a profile in the decomposition indicates that the profile of real voters are polarized around the specific candidate in question. The paper proposes preference polarization measures based on the weights of these component profiles and discusses a computationally simple way to obtain these weights, for an arbitrary number of candidates, without resorting to complete profile decomposition of a n!-dimensional vector. The results are potentially useful to measure preference polarization in a field of many candidates.

Date: 2023-11-30
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/server/api/core/bitstre ... fc650b8b7a4a/content
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:isu:genstf:202311301857330000

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ISU General Staff Papers from Iowa State University, Department of Economics Iowa State University, Dept. of Economics, 260 Heady Hall, Ames, IA 50011-1070. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Curtis Balmer ().