User:Lucasvb/Majority and consensus under ordinal and cardinal perspectives: Difference between revisions
User:Lucasvb/Majority and consensus under ordinal and cardinal perspectives (view source)
Revision as of 09:06, 20 February 2021
, 3 years ago→Ordinalism and the "majority of preference"
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Thus, under ordinalism or ranked preferences, "majoritary" is a property of the '''candidates''' more than that of the voters, as it is the candidates who are "drawing the line", not the voters. The voters are being forced to take sides which they do not create naturally.
Notice how fringe candidates (when the dots move towards the edge) can easily radicalize their minority faction, creating a highly distorted faction consensus near the fringe. In real life, complete allegiance to a faction, and support for political candidates, usually creates an echo chamber effect. These people will be more likely to side and engage with other "like-minded people", according to this faction that was established. But as we can see from the above diagram, even if the population as a whole shares a lot of consensus and agreement, a fringe candidate can generate the illusion of a faction having its own fringe consensus.
What if we had a mixture of polarization and consensus?
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[[File:Ranking centroids polarized.gif]]
As you can see from the animation, under polarization the behavior is virtually identical. Rankings, by their own nature, cannot distinguish between true polarization and an artificial one.
However, despite these conceptual shortcomings, the "majority of preference" still serves its intended purpose, as the candidate closest to a consensus will very likely be on the majority's side, due to the very nature of consensus. This explains why majority rule has performed well enough in voting applications: it's a very good rule of thumb, but it is just that, a rule of thumb.
Condorcet voting methods take this weakness into account, and attempt to test every possible pairwise faction split between multiple factions. If one faction always dominates the other, then it is much more likely to be a genuine consensus.
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