Borda paradox in the 2017 Iranian presidential election: empirical evidence from opinion polls
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Borda paradox in the 2017 Iranian presidential election: empirical evidence from opinion polls Mehdi Feizi1 · Rasoul Ramezanian1 · Saeed Malek Sadati1 Received: 15 April 2019 / Accepted: 16 December 2019 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract Different voting paradoxes identified by social choice theorists have rarely been documented in real-world elections. The collected data from the opinion polls in the 2017 Iranian presidential election provides substantial empirical evidence indicating that during the electoral campaigns, strong Borda paradox (the Condorcet loser wins plurality.) and weak Borda paradox (An alternative that is not the Condorcet winner wins plurality.) have occurred. At the same time, there was no evidence of a Condorcet paradox, i.e., a cycle among the top three candidates. The results support the empirical relevance of theoretical paradoxes in social choice and a call for the importance of voting procedures. Keywords Social choice · Condorcet paradox · Borda paradox · Iranian presidential election · Voting methods JEL Classification D71 · D72
1 Introduction Iran has a theocratic presidential form of government. Every 4 years, a presidential election is held to announce the president based on the majority rule. If no candidate wins a majority of the votes, the election is repeated for a second round between the top two candidates. Nevertheless, opinion polls give us this opportunity not only to see what would happen in different voting methods, but also to determine its anomalies and paradoxes. At least in Iran, the 2017 presidential election was the first time * Mehdi Feizi [email protected] Rasoul Ramezanian [email protected] Saeed Malek Sadati [email protected] 1
Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran
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to have had some survey data with polling agencies reporting relative pluralities and also pairwise comparisons. On the one hand, the machinery does not still work perfectly since Iranians are experiencing elections for only a few decades and emotional instances might change voters’ attitude toward different candidates. On the other hand, most of the people do not identify themselves with a specific political party since there are no westernstyle political parties who campaign months before the Election Day. They make up their mind about whom to vote for very late, even in the last days before the Election Day. Meanwhile, their preference over candidates might vary a lot and be prone to different social and behavioral biases. Therefore, looking from this perspective, with not necessarily consistent and rational political preferences, it is expected to observe some paradoxes in political preferences of voters over candidates. To make a collective choice that genuinely represents the will of the people, we need to aggregate individual preferences socially via a voting method. Theoretically, three main voting methods are chosen for this study: The Plurality Rule, the Condorcet Method, and the Borda Count. Th
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