Talk:Approval voting

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Removal of Entire Subsection "Compliance with .. Criteria"

I know this may seem like a big edit but I think that this section adds absolutely nothing of value to the article. it is full of ambiguous usage of technical terminology that could mean many different things under different interpretations, and even with the most generous of interpretations most likely constitutes OR. The list of "criteria" are certainly real things that might be considered about a social choice rule, but this is an article about Approval voting not an article about "list of criteria for election rules." also many of the pass-fail entries in the table are not even correct.

absent strong protest I will remove this section. if someone wants to re-add it please do so in way that uses technically unambiguous terminology and provides proper citations, and is relevant to specifically Approval voting as a rule. Affinepplan (talk) 14:43, 21 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Note that this was done and partially reverted and citations were provided. McYeee (talk) 23:27, 21 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

yes, I saw the citations (and have read them). I don't think they suffice. As just a example nitpick (and certainly not the entirety of problems with the section) the reference to "Strategyproof" does not specify whether it refers to the absence of profitable manipulations for individual agents, for coalitions of agents, or for strategic candidate entry / exit, nor does it specify whether such manipulations are deterministic or if they are in expectation, etc.

also the phrasing "There is no ultimate authority on which criteria should be considered, but the following are criteria that many voting theorists accept and consider desirable:" is indicative of a non-academic author. an academic perspective will be more objective and neutral about "criteria" and more generally behavior of an election rule, rather than thinking only of which voting rules are "acceptable" Affinepplan (talk) 23:36, 21 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have a wording you prefer to "There is no ultimate authority on which criteria should be considered, but the following are criteria that many voting theorists accept and consider desirable"? For strategyproofness, does that distinction actually matter? McYeee (talk) 23:41, 21 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

yes my preferred wording would be to delete that clause entirely.

if someone wants to add a technically sound and more thorough section "Approval Voting #Manipulability" that could be fine. but as-is this does not suffice Affinepplan (talk) 23:44, 21 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Are you aware of any reliable sources contradicting the table? McYeee (talk) 00:05, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

are you aware of any supporting it? like I said, the citations provided do not suffice. the burden of proof is on the author of the content. Affinepplan (talk) 00:40, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I understand the burden. I only asked because you said "many of the pass-fail entries in the table are not even correct". McYeee (talk) 02:06, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I should rephrase that to some combination of "needs context," "needs citation," "so vague as to be unfalsifiable," and in the case of IIA, is plain wrong. This article states multiple times that Approval can fail IIA. This is simply mathematically incorrect and is a common misunderstanding of IIA among the "reformer" crowd (this is a particular internet community interested in election rules that usually quarantines their pseudoscience to mailing lists and https://electowiki.org/wiki/Main_Page ) Affinepplan (talk) 02:15, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I read that cell as saying that as saying that with approval voting, violations of IIA cannot occur when all preferences are dichotomous. Is that not how you read it? McYeee (talk) 02:38, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

with approval voting, violations of IIA cannot occur full stop. Affinepplan (talk) 02:44, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Do you have a source for that? McYeee (talk) 02:45, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

this is a well-known fact, but I suppose if you need a source you could use this https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2239118 (just one of the first I found on the topic on G Scholar) Affinepplan (talk) 02:48, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

another source would be this paper https://www.ijcai.org/proceedings/2018/47 showing that all Thiele rules satisfy IIA (of which Approval is a member) Affinepplan (talk) 02:51, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

The first source explicitly says it's working with dichotomous preferences. The second says it's "defin[ing] three axiomatic properties", which makes me think that we can't use that paper, to argue that the dichotomous preference definition of IIA is standard. I guess the standardness of the Dichotomous preference definition of IIA is kind of the point of dissagrement between you and Lime. I think that unless more sources are produces, WP:V says you're right. McYeee (talk) 03:33, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

that is a very well-established definition. the wording "we introduce" is just a writing style artifact and should not be interpreted as a claim of originality from the authors. Affinepplan (talk) 07:05, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I get that it's a not a claim of originality, but it's also not a claim of non-originality. In any case, I haven't seen sources for any other definition, so it's kind of a moot point. McYeee (talk) 21:10, 23 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Concur w/ @McYeee neither source establishes Approval satisfies IIA, without violating Unrestricted Domain, i.e. imposing dichotomous preferences. Filingpro (talk) 07:30, 10 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

of course, my rather strong tentpole planted there ^ depends on how precisely IIA is being defined in this context. I am using the typical defintion. if the author wishes to use an atypical definition in order to make themselves correct (I do not generally recommend this behavior) then they must do so explicitly. Affinepplan (talk) 02:45, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see that Approval can satisfy IIA. Axiomatically an election chooses certain alternatives at the exclusion of others. It's not an Amazon rating system. If we allow voters to vote for their preferred alternative in a two-way contest, and there is no dictator, I don't see how we can maintain independence as we start adding and removing candidates. Filingpro (talk) 07:42, 10 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]

for example, https://shs.hal.science/file/index/docid/121751/filename/stratapproval4.pdf is provided as a reference for the claims about the "trembling hand" equilibrium, but this paper does not even contain the words Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA), let alone discussion of Approval's compliance.

The row for "Zero Information" links to Impartial culture , but that is quite an orthogonal concept altogether. Zero information refers to a model of agents' beliefs, but impartial culture refers to a model of agents' preferences. Furthermore, the citation provided for this row (the Myerson Weber paper) absolutely does not support the claims made in the table and has nothing to do with "Zero Information," in fact the proofs in the Myerson Weber paper specifically rely on proving the existence of a very particular set of agents' beliefs. And of course it goes without saying that this paper doesn't touch at all on the "criteria" the author here is suggesting it does Affinepplan (talk) 00:56, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I repeat, if someone wants to re-add it please do so in way that uses technically unambiguous terminology and provides proper citations

@McYeee I hope you can see that this has not been achieved, and will agree with my decision to re-remove this section after another day or two has passed to gather feedback. Unfortunately I have had very bad experiences in the past with this particular author in content disputes and I do not think they will be receptive to criticism or correction, so we'll have to gather consensus here without them. Affinepplan (talk) 00:58, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that the current citations are insufficient. If no more sources are added, removing the section makes sense without prejudice to reinsertion with better sources. If sufficient sources are added, I think the ambiguity issue is fixable without deleting the section. McYeee (talk) 02:18, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I don't have any prejudice for the idea behind the section, of course. but it would need substantial explication, not just a different set of footnotes. Affinepplan (talk) 02:55, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

To be clear, I was not accusing you of prejudice. I meant without prejudice (legal term). McYeee (talk) 03:36, 22 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Archiving

I think we should move old discussion to an archive. Does anyone have any preferences on the details of that, or any objection to it? McYeee (talk) 23:29, 21 October 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Improve Binary Preference Note?

Current text of footnote: " Assuming voters have only two categories of preference ("approve" and "disapprove"). This can be a good approximation of preferences in a two-party system, or when voters are highly-polarized. "

Q: Is there at least one empirical election example to support the claim "this can be a good approximation"?

Q: Can we be more scientific in our assertion, i.e., how good is "good"? Can we quantify that? If this is an opinion, then should we disclose the opinion-holder? Would it be better to say "This might approximate..."

Q: If voters are binary, aren't the candidates too? If so, then who is the third candidate, a clone? Why would they run in the election?

Q: Is it logically possible to have an an electoral system based on approval voting that is a two-party system? Do we mean to say "when there are two dominant political parties"?

One approach might be to omit the claim in the second sentence. But this begs the question as to the relevance of the row "binary preference" in the compliance table.

A central problem may be that imposing binary preferences on voters violates an axiom in social choice theory—that voters may have meaningful preferences among the alternatives. Specifically if a voter may prefer any two candidates A > B, then for any unique candidate C, the voter may have a preference between C and A and/or C and B. ~ Filingpro (talk) 05:59, 10 February 2025 (UTC)[reply]