Syntatic and semantic taxonomy of preferential voting methods

Abstract

Preferential voting where the voters rank candidates in order of preference plays an important role in many decision making problems and have been studied intensively. Yet there are too many variations and many popular methods are promulgated differently in different regions. Hence, some iconic conventional methods are reviewed for syntactic patterns and categorized. A nomenclature for these voting methods is suggested to reveal their syntactic patterns. Over a thousand of voting methods are devised from the conventional procedural patterns. Over 60 representative voting methods are used to reveal their semantic relationship in the form of hierarchical clustering tree. All preferential voting methods perform significantly different from the simplest plurality method. © 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht.