Talk:Strategic voting

Germany tactical voting

It can even be encouraged by political partys: If a party will not be strong enough by itself to form a government, but could form a coalition government if another party would pass the 5-percent-clause it will probably encourage tactical voting. (As did happen in Germany in 1984)

Okay, I understand how Germany's system works now, and see how this is tactical voting. I'll try to work this in on one of the PR pages. — Preceding unsigned comment added by DanKeshet (talk • contribs) 16 September 2001 (UTC)

2-1 Voting

It seems this important voting strategy, which merits inclusion in Wikipedia, doesn't fit in either strategic nomination, vote swapping, or electoral fusion:

2-for-1 Voting

by Bruce Ackerman

In November, Americans won't be casting their ballots directly for George Bush, John Kerry or Ralph Nader. From a constitutional point of view, they will be voting for competing slates of electors nominated in each state by the contenders. Legally speaking, the decisions made by these 538 members of the Electoral College determine the next president.

In the case of Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry, electors will be named by each state's political parties. But Ralph Nader is running as an independent. When he petitions to get on the ballot in each state, he must name his own slate of electors. While he is free to nominate a distinctive slate of names, he can also propose the very same names that appear on the Kerry slate.

If he does, he will provide voters with a new degree of freedom. On Election Day, they will see a line on the ballot designating Ralph Nader's electors. But if voters choose the Nader line, they won't be wasting their ballot on a candidate with little chance of winning. Since Mr. Nader's slate would be the same as Mr. Kerry's, his voters would be providing additional support for the electors selected by the Democrats. If the Nader-Kerry total is a majority in any state, the victorious electors would be free to vote for Mr. Kerry.

This plan is consistent with the original understanding of the founders. When they created the Electoral College, they did not anticipate the rise of the party system; they expected voters to select community leaders who would make their own judgments when casting their ballots for the presidency. In designating Kerry electors rather than insisting on his own slate, Mr. Nader would be giving new meaning to this tradition that refused to view electors as simply vehicles of a candidate's will. In effect, he would be enabling his supporters to rank their choices: Mr. Nader first, Mr. Kerry second. (full article)

Should a new article be created? If so, how should it be named? Sir Paul 03:21, Jun 30, 2004 (UTC)

I would think this could go into the U.S. Electoral College article. There is a detailed discussion there now which this would fit well into. A brief summation of the general principle involved would also improve the broader Electoral College article. - toh 08:09, 2004 Nov 3 (UTC)

Brams and Herschbach

I see a reference which is quite non-standard (to say the least):

Brams, Herschbach, "The Mathematics of Elections" (sic?), Science (2000)

Apparently it was added a long time ago and never corrected or verified. I guess it refers to: "The Science of Elections" available online here:

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/292/5521/1449

This reference is correctly listed in the following article of Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting

Best regards

Fioravante Patrone http://www.diptem.unige.it/patrone/default.htm

IRV vulnerability

I don't see how instant runoff voting is vulnerable to the push-over strategy. I'm not so confident that I'll edit it out, but could someone doublecheck this and explain it here or in the article if I'm wrong? 66.41.154.228 (talk) 05:03, 16 December 2008 (UTC)

I've been researching these things for decades now, and I've never heard of a "push-over" strategy or tactic against runoff voting. In the past, we have had trouble with complaints being based on small sets of contrived, anecdotal examples. The peer-reviewed sources we have at Instant-runoff_voting#Tactical_voting seem entirely consistent with the likelihood that someone just made this up. GetLinkPrimitiveParams (talk) 04:12, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

It's extremely common for IRV to be vulnerable to pushover. A well-known example is the 2022 Alaska special election, where voters had an opportunity to support Palin, resulting in the elimination of Nick Begich (the Condorcet winner). –Maximum Limelihood Estimator 00:26, 18 April 2024 (UTC)

Merger proposal

I propose that Crossover voting be merged into Tactical voting. Tactical voting is defined as

occur[ing], in elections with more than two candidates, when a voter supports another candidate more strongly than his or her sincere preference in order to prevent an undesirable outcome

whereas crossover voting

refers to a behavior in which voters cast ballots for a party with which they are not traditionally affiliated.

- this seems to me a type of tactical voting and would be better served in the tactical voting article. - Thunderstorm008 (talk) 09:32, 1 May 2017 (UTC)

Oppose merge, as crossover voting is specially an American concept (given its dependence on party affiliation) and may be genuine or tactical. Klbrain (talk) 20:47, 21 September 2018 (UTC)

Closing, given the uncontested objection and no support. Klbrain (talk) 22:44, 8 January 2022 (UTC)

Puerto Rico is not an "Other Country" when the US is mentioned explicitly.

Seriously. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 216.17.149.1 (talk) 02:57, 5 August 2020 (UTC)

Move to Strategic voting

The ngram shows a 4x more frequent usage of strategic voting compared to tactical voting. Suggest changing lemma to strategic voting. HudecEmil (talk) 19:30, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Changed HudecEmil (talk) 17:23, 19 October 2022 (UTC)

Wiki Education assignment: Political Parties

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 26 August 2024 and 5 December 2024. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Mikb26 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by PurdueGrad29 (talk) 18:45, 18 November 2024 (UTC)

Removal of sources

@Affinepplan: You say that the sources I added are essentially SPS. Could you give some references indicating that Constitutional Political Economy and Electoral Studies are unreliable journals with such low quality control that their articles can be considered SPS?

As for the other point, you may think that statistical simulation papers are inappropriate, but they seem to be accepted elsewhere on Wikipedia (e.g. Green-Armytage strategy incentive papers, and various papers showing probability of various failures under impartial culture). So I don't think they can be dismissed out of hand just by being Monte-Carlo simulations. Would you accept a rephrasing, something like "Statistical simulations suggest...", instead of "Thus, ..."? Wotwotwoot (talk) 12:57, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

I guess I'm trying to be tactful and avoid saying it outright, but both papers are just extremely amateurish and low-quality. There's a reason they have zero citations. Neither author has any professional or academic credentials in the field... they are just enthusiastic amateurs with some various technical background whipping up "simulations" and then spending a while to pretty up the result.

I could do this, you could probably do this, any data scientist with a few free weekends could do this.

Not all statistical simulation papers are created equal :( Affinepplan (talk) 15:31, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

First, I'm going to quote the prose and citations that were removed (adding links to the journals):

Thus, Condorcet methods incentivize candidates to position themselves closer to the median voter and appeal to a wider section of the electorate than instant-runoff voting does.

• Robinette, Robbie (2023). "Implications of strategic position choices by candidates". Constitutional Political Economy. 34 (3): 445–457. doi:10.1007/s10602-022-09378-6. ISSN 1043-4062.
• Ogren, Marcus (2024). "Candidate incentive distributions: How voting methods shape electoral incentives". Electoral Studies. 90. Elsevier BV: 102799. arXiv:2306.07147. doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2024.102799. ISSN 0261-3794.

Now I'm going to point out how comical that Affinepplan is referring to these as "essentially SPS". These are both recent papers, so it's not surprising that they haven't been cited yet (especially when there's folks out there like Affinepplan shittalking and burying their results, cloaking themselves in anonymity). The dismissiveness by Affinepplan seems libelous to me, and I'll eventually restore Wotwotwoot's change soon if someone doesn't beat me to the punch. -- RobLa (talk) 21:58, 3 December 2024 (UTC)

libel requires a statement to be false

anybody who has spent much time reading high-quality publications in this field recognizes these papers as... not that. Affinepplan (talk) 03:12, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

before restoring the change, maybe get some opinions of actual experts? I would say this is a big fat {{expert needed} } Affinepplan (talk) 03:14, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

pinging @Jannikp97, @DominikPeters whom I know to be domain experts. I would love your opinions on the inclusion of the edit in question (and opinions on the quality of the source are relevant by proxy). Affinepplan (talk) 13:02, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

I'm not particularly familiar with either Constitutional Political Economy or Electoral Studies. Both clearly are academic peer-reviewed journals and they have well-regarded editors (neither experts on voting), but I checked the editorial boards of both journals and they don't seem to contain social choice experts.

After a brief look at the papers, I tend to agree that they are ultimately unconvincing and in my view shouldn't have been published as they are (which is what I would have said if I had been a reviewer). However, I'm not so sure that we as wikipedia editors should be making such judgments.

A way to argue against these papers that I think is more robust is to say that they are very much primary sources (WP:PSTS): they set up some particular simulation with a thousand arbitrary choices and come to some conclusions, rather than providing an overview of several different studies/simulations that have been done about incentives that candidates face. (There is very substantial literature about this using the term "strategic candidacy", but it doesn't contain interesting conclusions about the IRV vs Condorcet fight. There is a wikipedia page about strategic nomination but it doesn't seem aware of this literature.)

If one wants to keep it, one could make the sentence under discussion more neutral by writing it like "In some simulations on random data, Condorcet methods incentivize ..."

By the way, a nice theoretical paper about a similar topic is this one: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.09734, The Moderating Effect of Instant Runoff Voting, which is mostly about comparing IRV to plurality. DominikPeters (talk) 15:32, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

I mostly agree with @RobLa, it is peer-reviewed academic sourses and while at first glance the tone and some other aspects of it appear questionable, I wouldn't say such sources should be excluded. Their recency and topic make it unsurprising that there as not many citations.

I suggest they should be cited in the appropiate context, making it clear that it's based on simulations. Otherwise, they are mostly not about very revolutionary claims, are they? There are probably works with similar conclusions out there. Rankedchoicevoter (talk) 20:35, 4 December 2024 (UTC)

It sounds like rephrasing the statement would be acceptable to the people here. I'll wait a bit to see if anybody disagrees and then take a stab at it. Alternatively, we could try to get more people involved with an RFC if there's no agreement. Wotwotwoot (talk) 14:48, 5 December 2024 (UTC)

personally I do not think these sources should be included in the article at all.

if you insist, and are willing to phrase the inclusion in such a way that makes it very clear that these are fairly arbitrary "simulations" with many hand-chosen parameters and lack any analysis of empirical data justifying these parameter choices, then I will not die on the hill to block the edit.

but I would much much much rather you choose a better source based on outcome data and more robust analyses, like [2303.09734] linked above. Affinepplan (talk) 15:14, 5 December 2024 (UTC)