Impartial culture

The impartial culture or IC model is a simple model of how voters may vote in a ranked election. It assumes that every preference ordering is equally likely. For instance, with three candidates, there are six ways to rank them without truncation or equal rank. The impartial culture model assumes each voter picks one of the six at random when voting.

This model is not particularly realistic, but it's mathematically easy to work with.

As the number of candidates approaches infinity, the election becomes increasingly close to a perfect tie. Effects that depend on elections being tie-like in some way (like the lack of a Condorcet winner) will thus become increasingly frequent in many candidates under impartial culture. Tsetlin et al. found that impartial culture is the model that maximizes the chance of there being no Condorcet winner, consistent with this observation.

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