The Choice of Voting Rules Based on Preferences over Criteria

The community of voting system experts is largely divided on the issue of the best voting rule. Some – perhaps a majority – of the community stresses the performance related to Condorcet’s intuition, while others take a more “positional” view of the voting rules. This paper approaches the choice of the rule from the viewpoint of the individuals that will subsequently be applying the chosen rule in solving opinion aggregation problems. Our first starting point is that each individual has a preference ranking over the criteria. This starting point reduces the rule selection into the classic social choice problem. Using the Borda count one is able to construct a vector of weights that reflects the importance that the individuals assign to various criteria. Using the analytic results on the compatibility of various rules and criteria we can then associate each rule with a value that reflects the aggregated opinion of the importance criteria. Hence, the choice of the rules gets its justification from the views that the individuals have on the significance of the criteria. Our second starting point is based on weights that individuals associate with the criteria. The collective weights are then determined as in range voting. Again a justification of the chosen rules can be expressed in terms of the importance that individual assign to criteria.