Ben Tries to Choose A Wedding Caterer

From Parks and Rec. (Season 5, Episode 12)

Categories:

Run time: 1:35

Clip Description: Ben asks Tom, Chris, and Ron to help him select a caterer for the wedding. He has the three people try different dishes and vote for their favorites.

American Politics Concepts Discussed/Connected To: Three people each taste the options and vote for a favorite, which makes this a compact illustration of preference aggregation: how a group with different tastes turns individual rankings into one collective choice. It connects to voting rules and to Arrow’s point that the rule itself shapes the winner — plurality, approval and ranked-choice can each pick a different caterer from the very same three sets of preferences.

Possible Uses in Classroom: Use it at the start of a unit on voting rules, before any ballots or districts appear. Re-run the scene’s vote under a different rule and let students discover that the winner changes without anyone changing their mind — which is the hard part of Arrow’s theorem made concrete in ninety seconds.

Discussion Questions

Ben could simply order the food he likes. Instead he holds a vote among three people whose tastes he can more or less predict. What does running a vote get a decision-maker that deciding alone does not — better information, shared blame, or the losers’ agreement to go along afterward? And from outside the room, how would you tell which of those a real election is providing?
Ben picked the voters. In politics the same move is the franchise question: who counts as a member of the group whose preferences get aggregated? Try to state a principle for who belongs in an electorate — everyone affected, everyone who pays, everyone who has to live under the result — and then check it against a case where it gives you an answer you dislike. Every principle on offer includes someone you would rather exclude or excludes someone you would rather include.
Think of the last time you asked a group to vote on something you were going to be responsible for anyway. Did you announce the decision rule — most votes wins, unanimity, you keep a veto — before the votes came in or after? If after, you were doing something closer to consultation than to an election, and it is worth being clear with yourself about which one you wanted.

For AP Students

AP Comparative Government and Politics
Unit 4: Party and Electoral Systems and Citizen Organizations

Topics: 4.1 Electoral Systems and Rules; 4.2 Objectives of Election Rules
Skill: Concept Application
Big idea: Democratization
Course countries: United Kingdom, Mexico, Nigeria

Ben has three people taste dishes and vote for a favorite. It is a trivial decision run as an election, and that is exactly the use: with nothing political attached, students can see the procedure doing work, and then carry the observation back to elections where they already hold a side and would rather not notice it.

Discussion questions

Three voters, several options, one favorite each. Explain how a winner can emerge who is almost nobody’s second choice, and why that is a problem for calling the result representative.
Explain the difference between a rule that awards victory to whoever leads and a rule that requires majority support. Name a country that uses each for its legislature.
Suppose you had to choose the rule before knowing how anyone would vote. Which would you pick, and why? Now suppose you knew the votes first. Has your answer changed, and what does that tell you?

Short activity

Design the rule, then name what it costs (15 minutes). Election rules are built to serve goals: representing everyone proportionally, producing a government that can actually govern, keeping fringe candidates out, keeping the count simple enough to trust. Students pick two of those goals and design a rule for choosing among three options that serves them. Then, in two sentences, they name what their rule sacrifices in order to do it. Every electoral system is a trade-off, and a student who can state the trade-off theirs makes is ready for this unit’s free-response question.

Clip hosted on Critical Commons.