Statistical analysis of the DPL 2005 election

[Rafael Laboissiere <rafael@debian.org>]

Hi,

I did a statistical analysis (factor analysis) of the DPL 2005 election
results and put the conclusions at:

    http://people.debian.org/~rafael/dpl-vote-2005-analysis/

Here are some excerpts of the text:

Introduction

   The DPL 2005 election has been one of the most interesting elections we
   have had in Debian these last times. Many facts contributed to it. First,
   this election had a strong set of candidates, who presented interesting
   platforms. Second, the campaign was done with lively discussions in the
   debian-vote mailing list and a well organized IRC debate. Finally,
   the election was surrounded by a quite agitated context: an overly delayed
   release schedule for sarge, the semi-secret organization of the
   Vancouver meeting and the creation of Project Scud.

   Beyond the obvious who won analysis, one may ask which factors dominated
   the vote preferences. Answering this question is possible, in part, thanks
   to the Condorcet voting system used in Debian elections, in which the
   voting options are numerically ranked by the voters. In this paper, a
   multivariate statistical technique is applied to the tally sheet of
   votes cast. The data was pre-processed to replace non-ranked options with
   numeric values and a Factor Analysis (FA) was applied. FA is typically
   used to unveil the latent structure of a set of variables, accomplishing
   it by grouping variables (in our case, the voting options) together such
   that a limited number of dimensions can explain a large amount of the
   variance in the data set.

   Notice that FA is closely related to Principal Component Analysis
   (PCA), but FA results are often more interpretable than those of PCA. One
   drawback of FA is that the number of components that can be extracted is
   limited to roughly half of the number of variables. We show below that the
   three dominating factors in the DPL 2005 election were a rejection factor,
   a Anthony Towns factor and a Project Scud factor (see the Discussion
   section).

[...]

Author 

   Rafael Laboissiere (rafael@debian.org)

   DISCLAIMER: Although its format may suggest it, this article should not be
   considered as a fully scientific work. I have written it mostly for the
   fun of doing it. The interpretations are obviously subjective and I
   apologize for offenses that the candidates may take from this text.
   Comments and suggestions for improvements are welcome.

-- 
Rafael Laboissière