Hogarth picture

William Hogarth. An Election Entertainment (oil, 1754). Click to enlarge!


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?
 

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Results in Voting Systems

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