This is the first of the four paintings
included in Hogarth's Election series, property of Sir
John Soan's Museum, London. Any inch of the canvas hides a proper sense
connected with an actual event. I will explain only some of them following
Christina Scull's book The Soane Hogarths (by courtesy of
Susan Palmer, Archivist of the Museum). Whigs have gathered inside the
inn and the Tories are demonstrating on the street. Liberty and Loyalty
is written on the Whig banner, Liberty can be read on the Tory banner.
In this "loyal and liberal" atmosphere the one party is hurling bricks
while the other party is answering with the content of a chamber pot. The
man in the foreground has his head injured in the battle but has succeeded
in capturing a banner of the opposing party. The inscription Give us
our eleven days refers to adopting the Gregorian calendar in 1752 due
to the efforts of the President of the Royal Society being the father of
the Whig candidate. Obviously the jump straight from September 3 to September
14 was an eloquent argument con the Whigs who had "stolen" eleven
days of Tories' lives. On the contrary, the luxurious treat (the Mayor
seems to have collapsed from a surfeit of oysters!), the huge pot of punch,
and the kisses of the candidates are the best arguments pro. Now,
250 years later, can one find in the electoral campaigns something new?
* * *
A popular comparison of various voting systems leads to the famous Arrow theorem in the expository report presented at the 32nd Spring Conference of the Union of the Bulgarian Mathematicians (Sunny Beach, April 5-8, 2003: Proceedings, pp. 89-100) (in Bulgarian):
Voting Systems: Mathematical Challenges
An unexpected and very unpleasant peculiarity of the widespread majority vote is described in my paper presented at the 3rd Panhellenic Logic Symposium (Anogia, Greece, July 17-21, 2001):
The
Majority Voting Parliament
Is
either Oligarchic or Inconsistent