The occurrence of the paradox of voting in University elections

Despite its theoretical importance for both normative and descriptive concerns, political scientists have largely ignored the paradox of voting because of the lack of solid evidence that it ever occurs in practice. Methods have been found to tell us the expected probability of the paradox if certain assumptions are made about individual preference orderings [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. But how closely these assumptions (and hence the resulting probabilities) correspond to reality is not known. Moreover, voting procedures used in most institutional settings provide insufficient information to determine whether or not the paradox was present. Only by a careful analysis of the situation can one even infer that a voting cycle existed [7, 81. In fact, I am aware of only one reported instance in which the occurrence of the paradox is documented on the basis of complete individual preference orderings [10, pp. 45-46].