Voting with Partial Orders: The Plurality and Anti-Plurality Classes

TL;DR

This paper extends the Plurality and Anti-Plurality voting rules to preferences expressed as partial orders, providing axiomatic characterizations for these generalized rules.

Contribution

It introduces novel extensions of classical voting rules to partial orders and offers axiomatic foundations for these new classes.

Findings

Extended Plurality and Anti-Plurality rules to partial preferences

Provided axiomatic characterizations for the new voting classes

Enhanced understanding of voting rules in more complex preference structures

Abstract

In the theory of voting, the Plurality rule for preferences that come in the form of linear orders selects the alternatives most frequently appearing in the first position of those orders, while the Anti-Plurality rule selects the alternatives least often occurring in the final position. We explore extensions of these rules to preferences that are partial orders, offering axiomatic characterisations for them.