I have been full tilt exploring the relationship between mathematics and democracy for the last at least year and a half. E.g., check out my TED talk.
And I’ve been thinking about this relationship, in some form, for the last 8 or 9 years, ever since Jay Gillen said to me, “Everything you love about math is what free people love about democracy.” (See this previous post.)
Given this, it may be surprising that until fairly recently, the well-established mathematical subfield that explicitly addresses democracy, voting theory (aka social choice theory), never grabbed my interest. FWIW, this has changed, but I think my journey around it is indicative of something worth keeping in mind for mathematical people who want to use math to think about how society works. (E.g., me, and hopefully you.)
Voting theory asks: given a large number of people forming a collective (e.g., a nation or state!), and a choice the collective is faced with (e.g., electing a political leader!), what are the possible ways one could aggregate individual preferences into a collective decision? (E.g., everybody vote for one candidate, and the candidate with the most votes is elected, aka plurality vote, aka how most political elections work in practice; but other possibilities too, like instant runoff, the Borda count, approval voting, and score voting.) And what are their properties? (E.g., in plurality voting, there is a potential spoiler effect when similar candidates split the vote of the majority, which is mitigated in approval and score voting since they do not force voters to choose only one candidate to support.)
It’s sort of a puzzle: given how much I’ve always cared about math, and how much I’ve always cared about democracy, why wouldn’t I want to understand this developed and beautiful theory exploring this most fundamental democratic operation — how does a collective make a decision?
Well, I’ll tell you.
The first and loudest thing I heard about voting theory, beyond just what it’s about, was Arrow’s impossibility theorem. This is a “foundational” result in the theory. It is often glossed as asserting that “there is no perfect voting system.” (Do not take this interpretation at face value. More below.)
From this, I got the impression that the point of voting theory was for us to brain out about the possibilities, and then conclude (with mathematical certainty!) that “we the people” can’t win no matter what. I’m supposed to be excited about this?
Was the whole thing just an intellectual exercise? Many years ago, I listened to a mathematician excitedly describe the Borda count to some graduate students. I remember thinking, with some confusion, “Where is the excitement coming from?” It seemed to me that the mathematician was excited only intellectually, about the mathematical properties of this system, and was totally disengaged from the question of whether anybody had used it or would use it or should use it to make any collective decision.
In this context, voting theory seemed almost grotesque to me. I love math for math’s sake — my PhD work is in pure algebra. But taking the urgent moral and political problem of building a system of government that adequately reflects the will of the people, and using it as loose inspiration for some math for math’s sake — ick.
Now, I take full responsibility for this impression. Many practitioners of voting theory believe the system can be radically improved, and are much more engaged with the realities of elections than I was giving them credit for. Steven Brams, now a mentor of mine, was involved in the adoption of approval voting for leadership elections in several professional societies. (Steve’s attempts to push something similar with political elections have mostly been frustrated so far, although advocacy by the Center for Election Science, an organization Steve has advised, played a role in the recent adoption of approval voting by Fargo, ND.) And Warren Smith has been developing a website to spread information about score voting since 2005. Just as two examples.
Now that I understand that voting theory is meaningfully engaged with actual elections, I’ve done a 180, and I’ve been reading up on both the foundations and recent research, and am looking for ways to contribute myself.
That said, I retain the feeling (with hopefully due humility that I could be wrong again) that the field would benefit from greater accountability to the problems it’s trying to speak to. The imperatives of mathematical exploration are different than the imperative of improving the mechanisms by which the will of the people expresses itself, and these differing imperatives can be in tension.
I’m reading one of Donald Saari’s books on voting theory. Saari has developed a beautiful, geometric way of looking at election systems that offers great clarity in making sense of some of the counterintuitive things that can happen. This is beautiful and important math. He also tends to portray the Borda count as kind of the best voting system, and I cannot shake the feeling that this is more because of the mathematical beauty of its properties, when viewed through a particular mathematical lens, than a sober assessment of its value to society.
So. I want to see and be part of a voting theory that is responsive to the problem it involves itself in. We can talk about voting systems using the tools of academic discourse, but we must remember the stakes. This is not an academic exercise.
Appendix
I promised above a little explanation of my comment that Arrow’s theorem should not be taken as stating that “there is no perfect voting system”. Lemme get into that for a sec. Arrow’s theorem says a voting system of a very specific type cannot obey a certain very specific list of prima facie desirable properties all at once. My basic objection is that the theorem is too specific for this broad an interpretation. My more fine-grained caveat is that there is nothing God-given about the particular set of desirable features Arrow chose to analyze, so deviation from them is just one definition of “imperfection”, and there are plenty of others.
In either case, I don’t blame Arrow for this, but I definitely thought I was being told that making the system better isn’t on the table. My real motivation here is to disabuse you of that misimpression if you had it too.
Research in Practice 