Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Miller, Nicholas R.

Titel

Closeness matters: monotonicity failure in IRV elections with three candidates

Ist Teil von

• Public choice, 2017-10, Vol.173 (1/2), p.91-108

Ort / Verlag

New York: Springer Science + Business Media

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

EBSCOhost Business Source Ultimate

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• A striking attribute of instant runoff voting (IRV) is that it is subject to monotonicity failure—that is, getting more (first-preference) votes may result in defeat for a candidate who would otherwise have won and getting fewer votes may result in victory for a candidate who otherwise would have lost. Proponents of IRV have argued that monotonicity failure, while a mathematical possibility, is highly unlikely to occur in practice. This paper specifies the precise conditions under which this phenomenon arises in three-candidate elections and applies them to a number of large simulated data sets in order to get a sense of the likelihood of IRV’s monotonicity problem in varying circumstances. The basic finding is that the problem is significant in many circumstances and very substantial when IRV elections are closely contested by three candidates.