The Will of the People: Measuring social divides in multi-dimensional choice settings

The paper studies profile components that cause plurality scores to differ from scores under other positional methods. We focus especially on the differences between plurality tallies and the Borda Count. We show that these profile components consist of an equal number of voters supporting a specific candidate in the first and last places. In particular they have an equal number of voters supporting a specific preference order and its reverse. In light of recent attention on partisanship and political polarization, it is important to have measures of such profiles and an assessment of how much they contribute to positional tallies. The methodological contribution of the paper lies in cutting through the combinatorial complexities that crop up in analysis of rank orders over n-candidates to characterize and measure these profiles.