Condorcet’s Paradox and the GOP Primary
In many ways the election of 2016 was a particularly unique election. After all, the interesting GOP primary season only yielded the least popular candidate in election history. Such results seem counterintuitive: a majority vote generally should yield a choice that is preferred by most. This article suggests that such a result was not a failure of democracy, but rather a reflection of imperfections that consequently arise from aggregate behavior.
In class, we discussed Condorcet’s Paradox, in which, according to the class text, non-transitive group preferences can arise from transitive individual preferences. For instance, if person 1 has preferences X > Y > Z, person 2 has preferences Y > Z > X, and person 3 has preferences Z > X > Y, majority rule would result in the preferences X > Y > Z > X, violating transitivity (Easley and Kleinberg). The article suggests that this is what resulted in the overall strangeness and, in some perspectives, irrationality of the GOP primary. The Republican Party, as explained by the article, is made up of conservatives, populists, and moderates. Conservatives and populists would cooperate to elect a conservative to defeat a moderate, populists and moderates would cooperate to elect a populist to defeat a conservative, and moderates and conservatives would cooperate to elect a moderate to defeat a populist. The resulting paradox is similar to the aforementioned example: a conservative is preferred to a moderate who is preferred to a populist who is preferred to a conservative. It is not that the voters couldn’t make up their own minds as to which candidates they preferred, but rather that the aggregation of multiple voter’s preferences resulted in erratic group preferences. This could possibly explain how the GOP primary season yielded the least popular candidate in election history.