🚀 go-pugleaf

"Ian Johnston" wrote:
>> Ian Johnston wrote:
>> > Semantic quibbling. Do you or do you not think elected governments
>> > preferable to mob rule?
>>
>> My opinion on that question has no bearing at all on the issue of
>> whether the features (secret ballots, representatives etc) earlier
>> alluded to are necessary & defining for democracy. They are clearly not.
>
> Nonsense. They are clearly entirely necessary for defining democracy
> nowadays: how it was defined two thousand years ago is interesting but
> utterly irrelevant.

Rousseau said that the English are only free every 5 years - ie when they 
choose their representatives. You can tell he would have preferred direct 
democracy, where there are *no* representatives. Some would say this is the 
"true" democracy.

As for secret ballots, they haven't always been the norm, although they're a 
good idea IMO. Criteria vary according to which time period you're looking 
at and one or two can easily be removed or replaced with others without 
moving too far away from "democracy". Having too many criteria actually 
makes a system technically impossible to operate. Here's an interesting 
description of Nobel prize-winning economist Ken Arrow's work:

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In voting systems, Arrow's impossibility theorem, or Arrow's paradox, 
demonstrates that no voting system meets all of a certain set of criteria 
when there are three or more choices. These criteria are called unrestricted 
domain, non-imposition, non-dictatorship, monotonicity, and independence of 
irrelevant alternatives, and are defined below.


Statement of the theorem
Suppose that a society needs to agree on a preference order among several 
different options. Each individual in the society has a particular personal 
preference order, which they express by casting a vote on a preferential 
ballot. The problem is to find a vote-tallying mechanism, more generally 
called a social choice function, which transforms the set of preference 
orders, one for each individual, into a global societal preference order. 
The theorem considers the following properties, assumed by Arrow to be 
reasonable requirements of a fair voting method:

unrestricted domain or universality: the social choice function should 
create a deterministic, complete societal preference order from every 
possible set of individual preference orders. (The vote must have a result 
that ranks all possible choices relative to one another, the voting 
mechanism must be able to process all possible sets of voter preferences, 
and it should always give the same result for the same votes, without random 
selection.)

non-imposition or citizen sovereignty: every possible societal preference 
order should be achievable by some set of individual preference orders. 
(Every result must be achievable somehow.)

non-dictatorship: the social choice function should not simply follow the 
preference order of a single individual while ignoring all others.
positive association of social and individual values or monotonicity: if an 
individual modifies his or her preference order by promoting a certain 
option, then the societal preference order should respond only by promoting 
that same option or not changing, never by placing it lower than before. (An 
individual should not be able to hurt an option by ranking it higher.)

independence of irrelevant alternatives: if we restrict attention to a 
subset of options, and apply the social choice function only to those, then 
the result should be compatible with the outcome for the whole set of 
options. (Changes in individuals' rankings of "irrelevant" alternatives 
[i.e., ones outside the subset] should have no impact on the societal 
ranking of the "relevant" subset.)

Arrow's theorem says that if the decision-making body has at least two 
members and at least three options to decide among, then it is impossible to 
design a social choice function that satisfies all these conditions at once.

Another version of Arrow's theorem can be obtained by replacing the 
monotonicity criterion with that of: unanimity or Pareto efficiency: if 
every individual prefers a certain option to another, then so must the 
resulting societal preference order. This statement is stronger, because 
assuming both monotonicity and independence of irrelevant alternatives 
implies Pareto efficiency.

Interpretations of Arrow's theorem
Arrow's theorem is a mathematical result, but it is often expressed in a 
non-mathematical way, with a statement such as "No voting method is fair", 
"Every ranked voting method is flawed", or "The only voting method that 
isn't flawed is a dictatorship". These statements are simplifications of 
Arrow's result which are not universally considered to be true, because they 
require strong assumptions about what makes a voting method "fair".

Arrow used the term "fair" to refer to his criteria, but there is no 
inherent reason that these criteria should be considered a requirement for 
fairness. For one thing, Arrow's requirements implicitly require that the 
voting method uses a ranked ballot, but it would be narrow-minded to state 
that any voting method that does not use a ranked ballot is "unfair". If a 
method requires a random decision (such as to break a tie), it is also 
enough to be deemed "unfair" by Arrow's criteria.
Proponents of ranked voting methods contend that independence of irrelevant 
alternatives is an unreasonably strong criterion, and therefore Arrow's 
theorem is an uninteresting statement. Various theorists and hobbyists have 
suggested replacements for this criterion, but none have become largely 
accepted. The Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem also depends on the independence 
of irrelevant alternatives criterion, so opponents of IIA would conclude 
that it is uninteresting as well.
Arrow's theorem can still be seen as a useful result even if one considers 
its criteria to be too stringent: it provided the incentive to look for 
criteria that are looser but still reasonable.