I am always pleased to receive your comments and I learn a lot from them. Here are the first two comments I have received. I look forward to receiving others!
My email address is gordonjburt followed by @gmail.com
2 ‘There's actually been quite a lot of research on the question of party/electoral utilities.’
1 ‘Have you looked at the method used in Balinski and Laraki 'Majority judgement'?’
2 ‘There's actually been quite a lot of research on the question of party/electoral utilities.
It's been dominated by Dutch political scientists, presumably because they have so many parties that a) simple Downsian unidimensional models don't work, and b) voters tend to have more refined attitudes to parties than simply identifying with one and hating the other. The core measure of utilities is a 0-10 'probability to vote' (PTV) scale (which, despite some methodological wrangling, turns out to be very similar empirically to a standard 0-10 like-dislike scale). These have been subject to some of the analyses that Gordon mentions below: distances and correlations between ratings, that kind of thing. A few sources are listed below but the key points are summarised in the attached article by Cees van der Eijk, indisputably the Godfather of this kind of research.’
Van der Eijk, C. (2002) Design issues in electoral research: taking care of (core) business. Electoral Studies, 21, 2, 189-206.
van der Eijk, C., Niemöller, K., 1983. Electoral Change in the Netherlands. Empirical Results and Methods of Measurement. Amsterdam: CT Press.
Tillie, J., 1995. Party Utility and Voting Behavior. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis.
Oppenhuis, E., 1995. Voting Behavior in Europe: A Comparative Analysis of Electoral Participation and Party Choice. Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis.
van der Eijk, C., Franklin, M.N., eds., 1996. Choosing Europe? The European Electorate and National Politics in the Face of Union. Ann Arbor (Mi), The University of Michigan Press.
1 ‘Have you looked at the method used in Balinski and Laraki 'Majority judgement'?’
Majority Judgment
Measuring, Ranking, and Electing
Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki
Table of Contents and Sample Chapters
In Majority Judgment, Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki argue that the traditional theory of social choice offers no acceptable solution to the problems of how to elect, to judge, or to rank. They find that the traditional model--transforming the "preference lists" of individuals into a "preference list" of society--is fundamentally flawed in both theory and practice.
Balinski and Laraki propose a more realistic model. It leads to an entirely new theory and method--majority judgment--proven superior to all known methods. It is at once meaningful, resists strategic manipulation, elicits honesty, and is not subject to the classical paradoxes encountered in practice, notably Condorcet's and Arrow's. They offer theoretical, practical, and experimental evidence--from national elections to figure skating competitions--to support their arguments.
Drawing on insights from wine, sports, music, and other competitions, Balinski and Laraki argue that the question should not be how to transform many individual rankings into a single collective ranking, but rather, after defining a common language of grades to measure merit, how to transform the many individual evaluations of each competitor into a single collective evaluation of all competitors. The crux of the matter is a new model in which the traditional paradigm--to compare--is replaced by a new paradigm--to evaluate.
2011, MIT Press
‘Majority Judgment is a single-winner voting system proposed by Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki. Voters freely grade each candidate in one of several named ranks, for instance from "excellent" to "bad", and the candidate with the highest median grade is the winner. If more than one candidate has the same median grade, a tiebreaker is used which sees the "closest-to-median" grade. Majority Judgment can be considered as a form of Bucklin voting which allows equal ranks.’ (Wikipedia)
Applying this method to the data in my note SM3 gives the following results. The Greens have the highest median grade and so are the ‘majority judgment’ winner:
Greens -1
Labour -1.5
Conservative -2
Liberal Democrat -2
UKIP -3
BNP -5
It is significant that this method uses the median. Labour squeaks ahead of the Greens when the mean is used.
Balinski, M. and Laraki, R. (2011) Majority judgment. Measuring, ranking and electing. MIT Press.
See Wikipedia: ‘Majority judgment’