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Hi Clay, I'm not specifically advocating for For and Against (at least not compared to Approval), but I think it has interesting properties that can be used effectively for explaining vote splitting and Duverger's Law to those who don't quite grasp it. (I also think the fact that it could theoretically be phased in gradually is very interesting, particularly to those that worry about politicians who were elected with plurality being reluctant to endorse a different method) To the best I can test it, though, (I've been working on a graphically based voting simulator), For and Against comes up with remarkably good results compared to Approval, sometimes better, sometimes worse. Let me know if you want to see the graphical voting simulator, I'd be interested in your ideas about the assumptions made (there are lots of ways to tune it). I guess the way I'd put it is "yes it still has vote splitting, but that vote splitting doesn't result in Duverger's Law") Interestingly, For and Against is less expressive than Approval if there are five or more candidates, but more expressive if there are only 3. (e.g. you can say "Nader>Gore>Bush", rather than just "Nader=Gore>Bush" or "Nader>Gore=Bush") But again, I think the main value of For and Against is using it to explain how vote splitting results in a duopoly, ultimately opening people's minds to Approval or for that matter STAR (which I see you are the inventor of?). If you weight it toward "against" (e.g. count the against votes as -1 but the for votes as only 0.1), it has the exact opposite effect as plurality, in the sense that parties would want to have many candidates running, to dilute the against votes directed at their candidates. If you count them equally, though, the vote splitting effects effectively cancel each other out. The tunability of the method, as well as the way its strategy sort of directly derives out of Plurality strategy, has a lot of pedagogical value to me. Approval addresses vote splitting and Duverger's Law, but I personally find it harder to clearly explain how it actually accomplishes that. |