Re: Statistical analysis of the DPL 2005 election
* Rafael Laboissiere <rafael@debian.org> [2005-04-22 12:07]:
> 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/
I added to the paper above some comments by Steve Greenland and Chris
Lawrence. Here are the relevant paragraphs:
Factor#2 - the Anthony Towns factor:
[...]
In a personal communication, Steve Greenland suggested that AT's
technical skills were irrelevant and that the reaction for or
against AT was largely based on these two components:
1. AT had proposed temporarily limiting access to the mailling
lists for people who violated standards of conduct. Steve
suspects that this produced a strong reaction of either
it's about time or completely out of the question.
2. As noted above, AT is active at the infrastructure level
of Debian, which gives him a lot of de-facto power over the
project. Steve would guess that some people did not think
that combining this with the office of DPL was a good
idea.
Discussion
[...]
One might also question whether it is legitimate to use the rank
order in the ballots as numerical values for the FA. In a
private communication, Chris Lawrence argued that it may be better
to use a scaling technique, like Unfolding, which would convert
each ballot to a set of distances between the voter's ideal
political position and the candidates'ones. Using the distance
matrix it would be then possible to find the position of each
voter and each candidate in a low-dimensional policy space. Open
questions with this approach are how to treat non-ranked option
and ties, and whether it is better to use a metric or non-metric
Unfolding technique.
--
Rafael
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