Talk:Majority rule

Some examples would be useful, as well as a good reference source or two. - David Oberst 22:59, 25 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes, and also clarifying how the rule is supposed to operate (when there are more than two choices). At pages like Arrow's impossibility theorem it seems like "the majority rule" has a technical meaning on voting system research, but it isn't clear from this page what that meaning is. Kingdon 15:40, 29 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, Eberhard Wesche (talk · contribs), for expanding this. Some of the text at Arrow's impossibility theorem may need tightening, but this page is now in better shape. Kingdon 14:25, 18 June 2007 (UTC)

The whole article is quite unclear. Firstly there are many different expressions of Majority rule; plurality, supermajorities, simple majorities. Secondly, despite it's popularity in democracies there are serious problems with majority rule, I think any article should have a discussion of these. I know this post is quite negative, I promise to come back and help fix it! AleXd (talk) 03:10, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

As others have noted, this page needs thorough revision. In my opinion it should focus on majority rule as a binary decision rule and include information about May's theorem. Discussion of how majority rule relates to choosing one of three or more candidates should be put into a subsection, if at all. I'd be willing to revise the article myself, if I thought the changes would be welcome, but I'd feel awkward doing so, as I'm new here. SgtSchumann (talk) 01:40, 7 February 2008 (UTC)

Having received no feedback about my proposal and surmising that there's still agreement that the whole article had problems, I've done what I said I'd feel awkward doing and made a thorough revision of the article. Though snippets of the previous draft can be found in the article, the only section that really remains the same is Voting on single issues and suboptimality. Most of the other sections were by and large unrelated to majority rule as a binary decision rule. (Majorities in the context of voting systems that choose from among three or more options are not directly relevant to majority rule.) SgtSchumann (talk) 01:44, 10 June 2008 (UTC)

Majority rule and minority rights -- weak

very weak just a comment, 171.64.71.23 12:35, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Arbitrariness

I have two concerns about this section of the article. First, regrettably I feel that although I cite a number of references in this section, I have put information together in a way that constitutes original research. I think we'd do well to put this information into (a) section(s) closer to the beginning of the article about the properties of majority rule.

My other concern is that I highly doubt that a relevant authority would ever say that majority rule is arbitrary. Even a voting theorist who despises unfettered majority rule would be familiar with May's theorem and recognize that majority rule alone satisfies a particular set of desiderata. So unless someone can provide a reference for this claim, I'd like to remove this claim and put the remaining information into other sections. —Preceding unsigned comment added by SgtSchumann (talk • contribs) 13:29, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

Merge "Simple Majority Voting" with this article?

I've made the changes I proposed under Arbitrariness. I've also incorporated some material from simple majority voting, because there is a suggestion on that article's talk page -- a good suggestion, to my mind -- that the articles be merged. --SgtSchumann (talk) 16:19, 31 October 2008 (UTC)

Bias

This article basically reads like propaganda for the virtues of majority rule. I've marked it as such.

Thank you for the interest in the article. Do you have any suggestions on how it can be improved? --SgtSchumann (talk) 06:10, 15 November 2008 (UTC)

I'm going to remove the tag for the following reasons:

1. The tag says that the article has been nominated for a check. I'm admittedly unfamiliar with the process, but I see no indication that this has actually happened. (I've looked at both "What Links Here" and "The Neutral Point of View Noticeboard")
2. Wikipedia guidelines suggest that you post your reasons for finding an article non-neutral before adding the tag you did, but you did not do so.
3. The one edit you made in which you were explicitly trying to correct non-neutral POV has gone unchallenged.
4. There have been a number of edits aimed at fixing POV since then.

Again, thank you for your interest in the article. I was happy to see your and MarkusSchulze's edits; it's been lonely here. If you still have concerns about the article, I recommend enumerating them or, if you're convinced that the article is pervasively problematic, at least providing a few specific examples. --SgtSchumann (talk) 05:17, 16 November 2008 (UTC)

All good points. And your edits have gone a long way toward balancing the article. Thanks! --Inebrio (talk) 01:29, 19 November 2008 (UTC)

I separated out the pro and con arguments into two sections "proponents" and "criticism" which shows clearly how lopsided this article still is. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Inebrio (talk • contribs) 05:31, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

I feel that I must revert most of the edits you've made. I'm doing this, because among other reasons

1. the resulting changes leave material that had been properly cited unattributed or wrongly attributed;
2. some of the arguments have been changed into something other than what their originators intended;
3. it puts cons and neutral material (including the long section entitled Voting on single issues and suboptimality) in with the pros;
4. it introduced anti-majority rule bias to some sections;
5. despite your intent to remove pro-majority rule bias from the article some criticism of majority rule was lost in your edits;
6. and the cumulative effect of all your changes made the article less readable.

If the main point of this was to show which parts of the article are problematic, I recommend trying to do so here, as most readers will be consulting the entry to learn about majority rule and not your criticisms of the article, however valid they may be.

Here are my thoughts on some of the specific edits you made: First, I've been removing citation needed tags from the lead, because in other articles the practice seems to be to leave out citations in the lead if it is properly cited in the body. If it turns out the manual of style recommends otherwise, I'll happily add the appropriate citation. Second, I thought the idea that an ochlocracy was a kind of systemic instability was intriguing, but I've removed it because there was no citation. Also, there didn't seem to be an elegant way to add a citation needed tag without casting doubt on the general criticism that majority rule may lead to instability (which is cited in my restored version, albeit indirectly). If you have a citation, I'd really like to see it. Or would it perhaps be enough to include mention of ochlocracy in a paragraph on tyranny of the majority? Finally, while I acknowledge that the first sentence of the section on May's theorem is problematic, I think the remedy you offered may have been more biased and was certainly less verifiable than the cure. May wasn't trying to make a claim about all voting systems -- only those that meet a certain set of desirable criteria. May's proof has absolutely no bearing on whether Ben Saunders' proposal, for instance, is fairer (in any sense of the word), and we shouldn't lead readers to believe that it does.

More generally, does this article have POV problems? Well, I won't say it doesn't. It certainly did before you first posted to this talk page. I'm really glad you did that, because it inspired me to look at Wikipedia's suggestions, and I learned a number of useful tips. It's funny how words like however can subtly introduce bias.

That said, I'd like to suggest that even if this article perfectly reported just the facts, there would still be a disproportionate amount of space devoted to arguments for unfettered majority rule. This is quite simply because that's simply the way the facts lean, at least when considered among the facts we know about and that the experts have written about. Before McGann wrote his paper the scholarly consensus was that May's conclusions about majority rule and fairness were correct. This wasn't because they had the same axe to grind; on the contrary many of them argued against the unrestricted use of majority rule. But May offered a formal mathematical proof, and the laws of math are unyielding. So what scholars did was argue that other considerations like minority rights were just as important. Unfortunately for this lot, McGann published his own mathematical proof in 2004, and the laws of math had not become any less unyielding. Since then, a number of experts have cited McGann's paper to support arguments to the effect that majority rule protects minorities; I know of no experts who have presented an outright challenge to McGann in this regard (but see my comments on Saunders below). In short scholars have long recognized that majority rule uniquely satisfies a number of desiderata and made it a standard against which other voting systems are measured, and that tendency has if anything been reinforced by McGann's recent proof. So what do we do? As the page on the NPOV policy says, "The Wikipedia neutrality policy does not state, or imply, that we must 'give equal validity' to minority views."

None of this is to say that there is absolutely nothing that can be said against majority rule or in favor of an alternative. It just means we need to be careful, lest we contradict the experts on an undisputed fact. Instead of inserting hedges or tags to cast doubt on mathematical proofs, we can cite experts who suggest that the proofs may have less value than some have initially thought. One way to do this is to argue that the proof considers too limited a set of decision rules. This is the route Saunders takes: Though he agrees that May's theorem is sound, he argues that decisiveness is something that can be dispensed with and recommends random ballot as an alternative. I mentioned in the entry that Saunders believes that majority rule would be of little use to the most despised minorities not because I find his arguments for random ballot especially persuasive but because I thought it brought the article balance, so I don't understand why you'd omit it. This is the sort of thing I look for when I search Google scholar for articles that might be critical of McGann and others who have defended majority rule. For better or for worse, I've yet to find much beyond Saunders' paper, but I invite others to look as well. If everyone who contributes to this article shares your enthusiasm, we're sure to remedy whatever problems remain very quickly. --SgtSchumann (talk) 09:05, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

The main POV problem with the article is the repeated use of the pattern: "Some critics argue such and such, but here's why they're wrong..." It is more balanced to put the pro arguments together and the con arguments together and let the reader decide which ones they find more compelling. My changes vastly improved the POV but I don't want to get in an edit war. Since you reverted my changes, the article again reads more like a propaganda piece than an encyclopedia article. --Inebrio (talk) 01:44, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

I made a new good faith effort to neutralize the POV. Please don't revert me. If you want to make changes, fine. I still have problems with how the "criticism" section reads. It is still obviously biased. We can address that later though after we've come to a compromise on my latest changes which I would argue any neutral observer would agree offers a more neutral pov. Thanks. --Inebrio (talk) 02:54, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

I've made some changes, but I haven't done an overall reversion of your edits. I think most of my changes come down to removing biased language, fixing attributions that go beyond what the relevant party actually said, and maintaining an acceptable style. One problem I encountered more than once was your use of the word claim, which is one of the words to avoid.

OK, good point about the word "claim" --Inebrio (talk) 23:13, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

For the moment I will not be doing anything about the fact tag you added and will simply ask, Why have you added a fact tag to something that is already referenced? —Preceding unsigned comment added by SgtSchumann (talk • contribs) 14:24, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Sorry, which fact tag? --Inebrio (talk) 23:13, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

It's in the "Minority Rights" subsection. ". . . some point out that the cloture rules in the US Senate were used to prevent the extension of civil liberties to racial minorities." Not sure why rules is in the plural. Could that be the problem? --SgtSchumann (talk) 23:34, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

OK I see now. I think the sentence could be made more clear. "Point out" is another phrase to avoid. How about something like "McGann relates episodes in the US Senate where a supermajoritarian cloture rule was used to block the extension of civil liberties to racial minorities through filibustering, when a simple majority could have ended the filibuster.[1]" ? --Inebrio (talk) 00:34, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

I've given more thought to your proposal to separate "Criticism" into "Pros" and "Cons" sections. I was initially averse to this idea, since it seemed to me that we would need to replicate a lot of content, putting it into both sections. But I see now that this wouldn't have to be the case, as McGann's considerations regarding minority rights, for example, are largely independent of "supermajoritarians"' (for the lack of a better term) considerations. Also, if we did this, it would probably be easier to find a place to squeeze in Buchanan and Tollock's argument. Since I know which citation goes with which argument, I'll make a rewritten version of the section, and if we find it less biased, we can keep it. Sound good? --SgtSchumann (talk) 17:02, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Sounds good. I think the article is getting better all the time. Thanks for your cooperation! --Inebrio (talk) 23:13, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Sargent Schumann although I appreciate the limited flexibility you've shown so far and I recognize that the bias in this article has been somewhat addressed, I must persist in pointing out that overt bias remains. For example the section about limiting majority rule is full of contra-arguments, while the section against limiting majority rule contains no contra-argumements. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Inebrio (talk • contribs) 03:06, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

In response to this I'd like to point out the following:

1. The section against limiting MR does contain a counter-argument or at least a consideration against MR; see the reference to Saunders.
2. You've failed to note that even if all the counterarguments were removed from the subsection for limiting MR, it would still be longer than the subsection against limitations and that the longest subsection (Referendums) has absolutely nothing positive to say about MR.
3. Finally, as I've noted before on this talk page, even if there were a lack of parity between the arguments, that alone wouldn't warrant the inclusion of a bias tag. Wikipedia also has a policy of giving weight proportionate to what experts say. (See "Balancing Different Views".) Though I have found experts who concur with the arguments found in the subsection you complain about, with the exception of Saunders I can't find experts who offer counter-arguments. Including the reference to Saunders may actually be overly generous, considering that other experts seem uninterested in what he says. In short it looks to me like there is something approaching a scholarly consensus to the effect that there are no compelling counter-arguments for the arguments in that section, and that's not for a lack of effort on my part. Do you know something I don't? If so, why not simply include the appropriate information and cite the appropriate references?

--SgtSchumann (talk) 04:01, 28 November 2008 (UTC)

Consolidation?

Since I'm interested in this subject, I found the following wiki articles which are all about facets of the same thing. There may be more. Is consolidation or at least more cross pollination possible?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority_vote
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majoritarian
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Majority
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochlocracy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_the_majority

Here are some of my thoughts:

• It would be more appropriate if majority vote redirected the reader to either this article or majority.
• The article majority vote does link to, "Majoritarianism", is a mess. I complained about the state of affairs on the 12th and have yet to get a response. I suspect that many of the arguments discussed here could be considered arguments for majoritarianism, making "Majoritarianism" redundant. But without having good sources defining majoritarianism in front of me I feel that I should refrain from changing that article in any way.
• As for the other articles, I think the subjects deserve separate entries, but linking between them can't be a bad thing. --SgtSchumann (talk) 06:07, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Buchanan and Tullock

On p. 3 of "The Tyranny of the Supermajority" McGann notes that Buchanan and Tullock argue that only unanimity guarantees economic efficiency. I've read elsewhere that they find supermajorities with lower thresholds -- but not a majority -- to be acceptable. I've thought a lot about where and how to include this and haven't come up with anything. Perhaps someone else will. This might go some way towards addressing concerns about bias. --SgtSchumann (talk) 14:57, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Plurality and Public Elections

I've restored some content that I'd put into the section currently entitled "Use". One of the reasons I put the content there to begin with was to correct a common misconception about majority rule -- namely, that it is pervasively used in single-seat elections. After this was changed the first time I went to the extra length of adding a section to explain why the change was wrong, complete with citation. In spite of this it has been changed again, so I've reverted it and added a citation to that section as well. If anyone wishes to dispute this, please note the following:

1. Majority rule is equivalent to plurality only in the case of two candidates. However, this does not mean that majority rule is used in the case of two candidates, and if it did, it would be arbitrary to say so, since in this case it is also equivalent to Borda, Instant Run-off Voting, Schulze and nearly every other voting system that has ever been invented. There is no need to point out that majority rule is equivalent to plurality in the two-candidate case in the "Use" section, because this is already done in the "Distinction" section.
2. More importantly as far as Wikipedia is concerned, the claim that plurality is used in two candidate public elections is verifiable, and it has been cited. Please refrain from removing cited facts from an article or introducing uncited contradictory material.

--SgtSchumann (talk) 16:29, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Referenda

How about a section explaining that critics point to referenda in general and California's Proposition 8 in particular as examples of how majority rule does a bad job of protecting minority rights? --Inebrio (talk) 18:47, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

This is probably worth mentioning. Can we get a reference? A link to a news article would be okay; a link to a primary or secondary source on voting theory would be better. FWIW McGann would blame the non-deliberative aspect of referenda. --SgtSchumann (talk) 20:12, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

That is a good point. It might be worthwhile then to explain that while McGann supports majority rule in certain cases, he might not support it in the case of popular referenda.

Good idea. Perhaps what we need instead of sections entitled Arguments for and Arguments against are sections entitled Arguments for limiting majority rule in various contexts and Arguments for unlimited majority rule in various contexts. --SgtSchumann (talk) 02:21, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Condorcet's Jury Theorem

Perhaps there's a place in this article for addressing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet%27s_jury_theorem and how it relates to majority rule. That is, according to the theorem, only if each voter is more than 50% likely to make the correct decision does majority rule make sense. Otherwise, it is detrimental. On the other hand, Condorcet's theorem makes certain assumptions which are not necessarily generalizable, but nonetheless help to elucidate the problem space we are working in. Thoughts? --Inebrio (talk) 03:10, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

I love Condorcet. If you want to mention his ideas, you won't have to twist my arm very hard. Just please be sure to include a well-formatted citation. --SgtSchumann (talk) 06:09, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Limitations on Majority Rule in Various Contexts

I've just created this section. I intend it to supercede the former "Criticisms" section, which was thought to reflect bias. The main difference is that arguments for the use of majority rule (in certain contexts) are now separated from arguments against the use of majority rule (in certain contexts). However, counter-arguments still accompany their corresponding arguments. With these changes I've made content about referendums a subsection of this section, and I've added two new arguments for limiting the use of majority rule. I've also modified a sentence that was marked with a "citation needed" tag and removed the tag. Finally, I've removed the "bias" tag that was at the head of this section; at this point I find it very difficult to believe that a neutral observer would find a pro-majority rule bias in this section.

I have left some material added very recently off the page, because (a) it was unsourced and (b) the sources I have before me contradict the claims found therein. --SgtSchumann (talk) 05:31, 26 November 2008 (UTC)

Non-binary decision rules

I've removed links to approval voting and instant run-off voting. Though the heuristics of IRV and perhaps approval voting as well show an appreciation for majority rule (e.g. IRV uses a process that narrows the field of candidates to two and selects the one supported on a majority of the transferred ballots), the same can be said of a number of other decision rules, including any that invariably selects the Condorcet winner. I think it's sufficient to link to voting system criteria that are related to majority rule in some obvious way and allow people to follow the links to uncover which methods satisfy those criteria. —Preceding unsigned comment added by SgtSchumann (talk • contribs) 07:01, 21 August 2009 (UTC)

Reverting "Limitations" section

I've reverted the "Limitations" section. Characterizing it as criticism and replies to criticism arbitrarily privileges criticism of majority rule (MR). For example, the argument that MR protects minorities by offering them the minimal threshold could easily stand alone as a consideration for the use of MR.

I am, however, a fan of all the other edits that have been made recently.

-- Marie Paradox (talk) 22:39, 3 February 2010 (UTC)

Majority rule protects minorities

I've reinserted this, because a citation for it is found in the main body of the text. (The article cites McGann; last I checked his works on majority rule were widely cited, and no expert contradicted his findings on majority rule.) According to the manual of style it isn't necessary to cite text in the lead. However, if anyone wants to do so, I won't object, though I might suggest that for the sake of neutrality we ought to add a citation for the claim about tyranny of the majority as well. -- Marie Paradox (talk) 13:08, 5 June 2010 (UTC)

After looking at the article again I think the problem is that after an edit it was no longer clear what content was covered by the citation. I've added another note in the hopes of clarifying this. -- Marie Paradox (talk) 13:15, 5 June 2010 (UTC)