Borda's voting paradox: Theoretical likelihood and electoral occurrences

✍ Scribed by Andrew M. Colman; Ian Pountney

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1978
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 503 KB
• Volume: 23
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 8756-6079
• DOI: 10.1002/bs.3830230103

✦ Synopsis

Voting procedures, which play a major role in the decision making subsystems of group and societal level systems, generate interesting paradoxes. Some have been intensively studied in recent years. The possibility that the alternative chosen by simple plurality voting may not be preferred to the defeated alternatives by a majority of the voters has, however, been neglected since its discovery by Borda in the 18th Century. The Borda effect has important implications for demomatic theory and practice. With the use of survey data regardiae voters' preference rankings, occurrences of the Borda effect were sought in the reaulte of a British General Election. m e n instances were found out of 261 thrcx-comered contesta. Fourteen of these resulted in a Conservative win, although in each case a majority of the voters preferred the Labor or the Liberal candidate. The frequency of the Borda effect turned out to be lower than would have been anticipated with equally likely preference rankings, but the phenomenon resulted in a systematic bins m the electoral outcomes.