This week in my Civic Leadership class our Professor briefly
touched on Condorcet’s Paradox. After getting extremely excited because I knew
what she was talking about, I looked up the article she referenced in class. Last
Monday we spoke of Condorcet’s Paradox with respect to policy results; this article
was interesting in that it spoke of Condorcet’s Paradox with respect to
election results. Written in May of 2016, the article struggles to understand
how, in of a field of 17 qualified candidates, the two most unfavorably rated ones,
Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, were the frontrunners for the Republican nomination.
It tries to think of the Republican Party as an alliance of conservatives,
moderates, and populists, and uses Condorcet’s Paradox as an explanation for
why individually rational preferences can manifest as collectively irrational.
Conservatives
|
Moderates
|
Populists
|
|
1st
|
Conservative
|
Moderate
|
Populist
|
2nd
|
Moderate
|
Populist
|
Conservative
|
3rd
|
Populist
|
Conservative
|
Moderate
|
The article cleverly uses Condorcet’s Paradox to explain how
Donald Trump and Ted Cruz became the Republican front runners, but it makes a
few problematic assumptions and ignores quite a few important factors. I’ve
written the table as the preferences were explained in the article, where
moderates prefer a populist to a conservative, populists prefer a conservative
to a moderate, and conservatives prefer moderates to populists. Given the
unique personalities in this past election, I believe this assumption, not
backed by data, simplifies the process by which members of each group (conservatives,
moderates, and populists) ranked republican candidates, and that it is very likely preferences were not homogenous within the voting blocks. By this logic, only the
order in which the candidates were presented should have affected the outcome,
and I think it is rather obvious that there were many other factors that propelled
Donald Trump to the GOP nomination. After trying to understand how this
situation could be an example of Condorcet’s paradox when there was no clear
order of candidate presentation that favored the Trump/Cruz outcome, I realized
that it’s possible this is not an example of Condorcet’s Paradox at all. I
think the fundamental assumption of this article, the polls that described
Trump and Cruz as the most unfavorable Republican candidates, might not tell
the full story. Opinion polls can be extremely unreliable, and in this past
election we learned that they do not always accurately reflect the sentiment of
the voting population. I think it is very possible that what some considered to
be the irrational rise of Trump and Cruz might have just been the rational
result of voters expressing their preferences.
1 comment:
Alex, cool post. The 2016 GOP Primary election was so hectic and crazy that it's cool to see some simplified analysis and breakdown of such a long and wacky news cycle. I think you are correct in saying that the assumption made in the article you cited vastly simplifies a much more complex situation. I think you are spot on when you claim that there are important factors that might play a critical role in this analysis. The first that would come to my mind would be personality and ideology. I don't think you can break down 2016 Primary GOP voters into just conservatives, moderates, and populists. -- that's beside the point I'd like to bring up, though. While I understand and agree that a Condorcet Paradox can applied to this simplified situation, I think the model we laid out in class about the Roemer, Edwards, and Duke election is more probable in predicting what happened. I think it's very clear that the "Rules of the Game" matter very much in this situation, and the fact that there were so many candidates to choose from made it very easy for the two must unfavorably rated ones to be the front-runners for the GOP Nomination. It would certainly be more difficult to lay out a model where someone other than Cruz or Trump would be the Condorcet winner with 17 candidates, but I think such a model would explain why such a Condorcet winner would not win in the Primary as opposed to the Condorcet's Paradox.
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