| A joint Politics and Economics series |
| Social choice and electoral systems |
|---|
 |
 Mathematics portal |
A Condorcet (French: [kɔ̃dɔʁsɛ], English: /kɒndɔːrˈseɪ/) winner is a candidate who would receive the support of more than half of the electorate in a one-on-one race against any one of their opponents. Voting systems where a majority winner will always win are said to satisfy the Condorcet winner criterion. The Condorcet winner criterion extends the principle of majority rule to elections with multiple candidates.[1][2]
The Condorcet winner is also called a majority winner, a majority-preferred candidate,[3][4][5] a beats-all winner, or tournament winner (by analogy with round-robin tournaments). A Condorcet winner may not necessarily always exist in a given electorate: it is possible to have a rock, paper, scissors-style cycle, when multiple candidates defeat each other (Rock < Paper < Scissors < Rock). This is called Condorcet's voting paradox,[6] and is analogous to the counterintuitive intransitive dice phenomenon known in probability. However, the Smith set, a generalization of the Condorcet criteria that is the smallest set of candidates that are pairwise unbeaten by every candidate outside of it, will always exist.
If voters are arranged on a sole 1-dimensional axis, such as the left-right political spectrum for a common example, and always prefer candidates who are more similar to themselves, a majority-rule winner always exists and is the candidate whose ideology is most representative of the electorate, a result known as the median voter theorem.[7] However, in real-life political electorates are inherently multidimensional, and the use of a one- or even two-dimensional model of such electorates would be inaccurate.[8][9] Previous research has found cycles to be somewhat rare in real elections, with estimates of their prevalence ranging from 1-10% of races.[10]
Systems that guarantee the election of a Condorcet winners (when one exists) include Ranked Pairs, Schulze's method, and the Tideman alternative method. Methods that do not guarantee that the Cordorcet winner will be elected, even when one does exist, include instant-runoff voting (often called ranked-choice in the United States), First-past-the-post voting, and the two-round system. Most rated systems, like score voting and highest median, fail the majority winner criterion.
- ^ Lepelley, Dominique; Merlin, Vincent (1998). "Choix social positionnel et principe majoritaire". Annales d'Économie et de Statistique (51): 29–48. doi:10.2307/20076136. ISSN 0769-489X. JSTOR 20076136.
- ^ Fishburn, Peter C. (1977). "Condorcet Social Choice Functions". SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics. 33 (3): 469–489. doi:10.1137/0133030. ISSN 0036-1399. JSTOR 2100704.
- ^ Brandl, Florian; Brandt, Felix; Seedig, Hans Georg (2016). "Consistent Probabilistic Social Choice". Econometrica. 84 (5): 1839–1880. arXiv:1503.00694. doi:10.3982/ECTA13337. ISSN 0012-9682.
- ^ Sen, Amartya (2020). "Majority decision and Condorcet winners". Social Choice and Welfare. 54 (2/3): 211–217. doi:10.1007/s00355-020-01244-4. ISSN 0176-1714. JSTOR 45286016.
- ^ Lewyn, Michael (2012), Two Cheers for Instant Runoff Voting (SSRN Scholarly Paper), Rochester, NY, SSRN 2276015, retrieved 2024-04-21
{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) - ^ Fishburn, Peter C. (1977). "Condorcet Social Choice Functions". SIAM Journal on Applied Mathematics. 33 (3): 469–489. doi:10.1137/0133030. ISSN 0036-1399.
- ^ Black, Duncan (1948). "On the Rationale of Group Decision-making". The Journal of Political Economy. 56 (1): 23–34. doi:10.1086/256633. JSTOR 1825026. S2CID 153953456.
- ^ Alós-Ferrer, Carlos; Granić, Đura-Georg (2015-09-01). "Political space representations with approval data". Electoral Studies. 39: 56–71. doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2015.04.003. hdl:1765/111247.
The analysis reveals that the underlying political landscapes ... are inherently multidimensional and cannot be reduced to a single left-right dimension, or even to a two-dimensional space.
- ^ Black, Duncan; Newing, R.A. (2013-03-09). McLean, Iain S. [in Welsh]; McMillan, Alistair; Monroe, Burt L. (eds.). The Theory of Committees and Elections by Duncan Black and Committee Decisions with Complementary Valuation by Duncan Black and R.A. Newing. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 9789401148603.
For instance, if preferences are distributed spatially, there need only be two or more dimensions to the alternative space for cyclic preferences to be almost inevitable
- ^ Van Deemen, Adrian (2014-03-01). "On the empirical relevance of Condorcet's paradox". Public Choice. 158 (3): 311–330. doi:10.1007/s11127-013-0133-3. ISSN 1573-7101.