*Downsides of the *majority voting system as a way of breaking the negotiation deadlock
Negotiation is about two or more parties coming together and attempting to find a common ground concerning discussed and contentious issues. In majority of cases the process of reconciliation of the parties’ interests proves to be beneficial to all of them (so called win-win solution). Nevertheless, it happens so that negotiation comes to an adamant deadlock. With higher probability this situation might occur in the integrative type of negotiations, where both parties view the negotiation as a “zero sum game” and take for granted the size of the pie to be divided among them. On contrary, it seems that in the distributive type of negotiations it is easier to come up with certain solutions that serve the interests of all parties involved, in particular when the principled negotiation method is followed.
However the most popular method of resolving crippled negotiation process is taking a vote. There are many different types of voting systems that are commonly in use. The most frequently used one is a democratic voting (majority wins). Its advantages, such as understandability, impartiality, and simplicity are cited much often than its downsides, which in many cases are simply disregarded. Let us assume that we have three persons and three alternative options (A,B,C) among which the persons have to choose, then their sets of preferences might look as follows:
Person 1: A, B, C
Person 2: B, C, A
Person 3: C, A, B
Common sense would suggest that transitivity principle holds true in our case as well, which means that if y is better than x, and z is better than y, then also z should be better than x.
x B wins
On the other hand if the first pair is A and B, then A wins and later on is compared with C, and this is won by the option C.
A against B => A wins
A against C => C wins
The conclusion is that in case of limited number of voting rounds the order...