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 09:09, 20 February 2021
, 3 years ago→Ordinalism and the "majority of preference"
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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. In particular, it is a good rule of thumb for picking the candidate closest to the consensus, but as we can see from these animations, it is not adequate to infer what the ideological consensus lies, as it cannot distinguish consensus from polarization.
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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