I'm really lucky that the two things I remember from college are actually good things to know.

One is the median voter model which predicts representative democracies naturally are two party states.

The other is that in binary choice elections, outcomes can be completely arbitrary because of math. I'm talking about intransitive preferences. Turning many individual preferences into one big social preference can create random outcomes.

And it's good to know these things because people are going to make assumptions when you're a commmunist who isn't 100% enthusiastic about democracy. So if anybody tries me, I can actually sketch it out on a piece of paper.

  • Provastian_Jackson [he/him]
    hexagon
    ·
    4 years ago

    wikipedia references social choice in the fallacy of composition page which I just noticed. I know how reddit libs love linking to wikipedia fallacy pages, so I'm delighted it uses social choice examples "Even if all voters have rational preferences, the collective choice induced by majority rule is not transitive and hence not rational. "