Best posts made by Kaptain5

@k98kurz My intuition also initially led me to the idea of -2 to +2 scale with 0 as default. I unfortunately do not have my sources in order, but here are the conclusions I came to after further reading:

1. A default mid position has some weird and unexpected consequences. You can get a system which rewards the most unknown candidate.
2. Approval/score/rated systems by their nature create more positive elections with less smear. This was immediately observed in districts which switched from FPTP to Approval. When a voter rates two candidates independently in a 0-5 scale, they have the ability to punish both candidates which participate in dirty politics or reward both candidates who demonstrate bi-partisan cooperation. This is especially true in large fields of say 10-60 candidates.

I am working on writing a literature review of how the behavior or parties are influenced by the electoral system. There is a lot written about how FPTP leads to 2 party dynamics, but I am having trouble finding material related to observed or expected dynamics in STAR and approval.

Links to papers on this topic or related works would be appreciated!

@cfrank Thanks for the feedback! I will keep this in mind. For this trial I will only explore single-winner systems.

My study should be sensitive to:

• Party structure

• Effects of repeated elections (a series of elections can be viewed like a repeated prisoners dilemma. There is are equalibria at lose-lose and win-win. I should be able to discriminate differences in incentives towards either equalibria if they exist.)

• Validate or invalidate certain assumptions about how strategic voters playing well (but not perfectly) might behave

• The types of strategies which are actually nash equalibria in repeated stochastic incomplete information with human players. (strategy which is proven to be optimal in a complete information simultaneous 1-shot game, might not be optimal in a repeated stochastic incomplete information version.)

• Discriminating between strategies which might be optimal in a 1-shot version but bad in a repeated game (stabbing allies for example.)

• Level of exploitation an incumbent or leading coalition can leverage

• Failure modes

My study will not be sensitive to:

• exact values (this method is 5% better than this method).
• declaring a winner between similar methods.
• matching the distributions of real-world elections.
• exhaustive testing

@Toby-Pereira @Lime @Marcus-Ogren
Interested in your opinions on this