But nobody above you suggested Condorcet was an ideal system. The systems I suggested — approval and Majority Judgment — both allow an electorate to vote so as to elect a centrist, or not, in both cases honestly. So I think your criticism is valid, though its seriousness in practice is unknown.

(Well, mostly; if people really got tired of guaranteed centrist wins, they could strategically bury the centrist; even if they still preferred the centrist to the other extreme, if that preference were weak enough such burial could be a rational gamble, deliberately creating a Condorcet cycle which anyone might win rather than continuing a centrist dominance. But while that would cure the problem you note of centrist dominance, the problems of dishonest strategic voting it created could well be worse.)

ps. Also I wanted to apologize to the other JQ. I didn’t realize you were Australian and I didn’t mean to, as we Americans say, teach my grandmother to suck eggs. Sorry.

- It’s interesting and noteworthy whenever anybody discussing a work in the Pragmatist tradition, critically or even in a comment, invokes the notion of “truth”. ’nuff said.

- One of the reasons I’m late to the discussion is that I’ve been up to my elbows in Pickering’s Mangle of Practice, and I have to say there are many overlaps and congruences between Pickering’s study of how “science” gets done, and what I infer as the Knight–Johnson approach. But there’s something I haven’t seen mentioned, and if it’s present or implied in Knight–Johnson then it’s surely a microfoundation of their treatment of democracy as much as it is Pickering’s discussion of science:

Isn’t the democratic “planning” system the one in which a diversity of people can try things out? In other words, isn’t the creation and enforcement of policy and law the mechanism through which idealists of all types—whether in the majority or minority—are exposed to the practical consequences of the laws that are passed?

This isn’t a question about “truth-finding”, but rather one of the dynamics by which democracies undermine ideologues: Isn’t it the case that in a (functioning) democracy, the occasional instantiation of ideologically-informed policies makes their consequences more apparent? It seems to me that there’s feedback there which is not only itself necessary, but should probably suggest more than just “good communication”: The inefficiencies of the democratic notion of “truth” mean that even recently popular models, policies and stances are subject to reexamination.

I guess what I’m trying to ask is: Isn’t it the case that democratic societies are more consistently made aware that they’re collectively exploring what might work in any given context, and are structurally better able to adapt when that information changes opinion?

As long as the participants know what’s happened recently, that is….

IRV is well-suited for Australia, a parliamentary system where people are used to it. In the US, with a strong tradition of “independent” voters, a system which doesn’t force “forming a government”, and voters who don’t and probably wouldn’t understand IRV (if the SF Bay Area experiences are anything to go by), it would have greater problems, though it would still be an improvement over the current broken system.

As to the importance of real-world data rather than simulations, I also agree there. That’s why I’m doing my current research on Mechanical Turk, which uses human subjects. However, I am using induced preferences (ie, payments) to investigate strategy, as real election returns do not directly show honest preferences for strategic voters, and also because there is little data for some of the systems I’m studying, such as Approval Voting and especially Majority Judgment.

Sincerely,
JQ

Finally, there needs to be some consensus on what problems are for argumentative democracy to work well in problem solving.

In the hypothetical example where most of the voters don’t think global warming is a problem, then there is a consensus on what the problems are: and the consensus is that global warming isn’t a problem.

And if they turn out to be right, then this is the system working.

The potential problem is that the consensus opinion might turn out to be wrong. You’re asking voters to predict the future, and they might be mistaken.

I think there’s a fundamental difference between polling people on their current preferences — in which there is no objective fact of the matter — and polling them on a matter of fact (about which they can potentially all be mistaken), or their future preferences (about which they can also be mistaken, because people’s preferences can change over time in ways they did not predict, possibly because the physical world changed in ways they did not predict).

I agree with shah8 that at least part of the historically accurate answer is going to come from anthropology. More precisely, I would venture that the rise of alphabetization triggers a recasting of some anthropological values prevalent in a given population as abstract political (or religious) ideals and that these ideals are (frequently) the common ground on which the civic debate can take place. From that point of view, the rise of political islam (for instance) is the historical norm rather than an aberration.

See for instance Inde : la démocratie par la caste from C.Jaffrelot for a case study and L’Invention de l’Europe from E.Todd for a (tentative, but quite impressive and intellectually very challenging) formalization at the european scale.

In any case, you would be better advised to look at the ample data actually available, rather than simulations, which can easily be rigged to favor some particular choice.

The basic problem that shows is nonmonotonicity, in the form of “center squeeze”. Taking your issue of environmentalism, say the Green candidate got 30, the mainstream left party got 25, and the mainstream right (after all fringe right parties are eliminated) got 45. So the left is eliminated, and 10% of that vote goes right, and the right party wins. But if the Green were not in the race, the left would win easily with up to 55%. Insofar as people realize this can happen (perhaps from experience) they will strategically vote for the mainstream left, and you’re back to a strategic (pernicious) equilibrium of two-party dominance. Which, by the way, definitely holds in Australia (well, the dominance; though strategy is probably not the sole reason).

I’m currently running an experiment on Mechanical Turk which is validating this sort of problem for IRV, and shows that Majority Judgment is (in my scenario) immune and Approval Voting (relatively) resistant. If you want to know when I have a preprint available, email me (firstname dot lastname at gmail).

How so? For concreteness, suppose the issue is environmental preservation. Green candidates can run, directing preferences to whichever major party candidate is most favorable on environmental issues. If they get a substantial vote, and their recommendation on preferences has some effect, the major parties have a strong incentive to shift position. This happens routinely in Australia, on a wide variety of issues.

So, I’m eating Chinese today. The utilitarian calculation doesn’t work here, because it’s possible that you and the third guy only slightly prefer Chinese, and I really-really hate it. My intense displeasure is stronger that a slight increase of the pleasure in the two of you. Nevertheless, you win.

But you’re right, there is something there indeed, something that makes me put down the gun. It’s the fact that the two of you, a majority, will probably be able to kick the shit out of me. And it seems to me (at the moment. I may not be thinking straight, got a touch of flu) that this is the only ‘legitimacy’ that you can claim. Which is, actually, exactly what you do (“majority rules, minority drools”), right? But then, if I manage to get a machine gun, the ‘legitimacy’ is mine, right?