Favourability voting: Difference between revisions

This system encompasses all types of different possibilities: whereas in regular score voting, a voter who scores a candidate or party 50% could be interpreted as being three entirely different kinds of voters: someone who both loves and hates the entire platform, somebody who agrees with half of the platform but disagrees with the other half, or as a person who has neutral opinions (doesn’t necessarily approve nor disapprove) on the entirety of the premise (these are pretty clearly three different feelings from each other which essentially have little to nothing in common): Pairwise Favourability Voting understands this and captures these three unique opinions separately: the one who both loves and hates an entity ("love-hate relationship/frenemies") would give closer to 100% on both approval and disapproval, those who like half of something but dislike the rest of it ("meh/so-so") go to near 50% approval and 50% disapproval, whereas an indifferent participant ("whatever/I don't care") would put around 0% on both approval and disapproval), this level of expression allows for a better, more truthful way to sort out our preferences and for providing detailed statistical analysis.▼

Enhancing the nursery effect, lesser known party/candidate could easily be simply given a 0 under regular score voting, whereas with Pairwise Favourability Voting, approval and disapproval are uniquely separated as two different measurements and therefore a voter is much more likely to give a 0 score on both approval and disapproval to candidates they do not have an opinion of, whereas if a candidate is hated they are likely to be given a 0 approval and 100 disapproval (this is an improvement in voter honesty, as while 0 could be interpreted as an "I do not know" score a 100 disapproval is much less unambiguous)▼

Improving voter honesty, by fully including pairwise matchups, Pairwise Favourability Voting allows smaller parties to gain more prominence by allowing a voter to express how much more they approve of them in comparison to the big party which they hate (in distinct matchups).▼

As a result of this deeper dive, this system ends up having a very intensive breakdown and factoring in of many different possible circumstances in order for a full grasp of exactly which one a voter may be or take place in this world. Which in turn leads to a much bigger understanding of the depth of a voter's thinking. For example, one takeaway about score voting has been that voters will have to look at the polls before taking a stand on the candidates. This would be a pretty common situation to happen in most of the world during loads of this century: let's say there’s one person running, Candidate A, who has a heavily polarized electorate of support. On the other hand there is Candidate B, who is also polarizing but slightly less so. However, while a voter may hate Candidate A, they may also not like Candidate B much. However, looking at the polls and if they are seeing that these are likely the two winning candidates, this voter will be encouraged to maximize Candidate B's score (100%) and minimize Candidate A's score (0%), even though they don’t really like Candidate B. Now, strategic voting aside, this is partly because in score voting, there is no actual explicit separation of personal and matchup scores, unlike with Pairwise Favourability Voting. With PFV, this voter could go around 50% approval for Candidate A personally but when taken against Candidate B, a number more close or even equal to 100%. Alternatively or alongside this, they may give 0% disapproval for Candidate B against Candidate A, while still going -50% disapproval for Candidate B personally. This represents how the voter may not like Candidate B (the lesser evil) themselves but fully supports them against the greater evil (Candidate A), unlike with score voting, which makes it impossible to express a maximal preference against a much less preferred candidate without that being the entirety of their score.▼