A common criticism to simple majority voting rule is the slight support that such rule demands to declare an alternative as a winner. Among the distinct majority rules used for diminishing this handicap, we focus on majorities based on difference in support. With these majorities, voters are allowed to show intensities of preference among alternatives through reciprocal preference relations. These majorities also take into account the difference in support between alternatives in order to select the winner. In this paper we have provided some necessary and sufficient conditions for ensuring transitive collective decisions generated by majorities based on difference in support for all the profiles of individual reciprocal preference relations. These conditions involve both the thresholds of support and some individual rationality assumptions that are related to transitivity in the framework of reciprocal preference relations.

Majorities based on difference of votes and their extension, majorities based on difference in support, were introduced in social choice voting as tools to implement the crisp preference values (votes) and the intensities of preference provided by voters when comparing pairs of alternatives, respectively, with the aim to declare which alternative is socially preferred. Moreover, these rules require the winner alternative to reach a certain positive difference in its social valuation with respect to the one reached by the loser alternative. This paper introduces a new aggregation rule that extends majorities based on difference of votes from the context of crisp preferences to the framework of linguistic preferences. Under linguistic majorities with difference in support, the voters express their intensities of preferences between pairs of alternatives using linguistic labels and an alternative defeats another one if the first one reaches a specific support fixed before the election process. There exist two main representation methodologies of linguistic preferences: the cardinal one based on the use of fuzzy set, and the ordinal one based on the use of the 2-tuples. Linguistic majorities with difference in support are formalised in both representation settings, and conditions are given to guarantee that fuzzy linguistic majorities and 2-tuple linguistic majorities are mathematically isomorphic. Moreover, linguistic majorities with difference in support constitute a class of majority rules because all the possible majority rules can be generalised to the linguistic framework by adjusting the required threshold of support. Finally, linguistic majorities based on difference in support are proved to verify relevant normative properties: anonymity, neutrality, monotonicity, weak Pareto and cancellativeness.

In this paper we study to what extent majorities based on difference in support leads to triple-acyclic collective decisions. These majorities, which take into account voters' intensities of preference between pairs of alternatives through reciprocal preference relations, require to the winner alternative to exceed the support for the other alternative in a difference fixed before the election. Depending on that difference, i.e., on the threshold of support, and on some requirements on the individual rationality of the voters, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions for avoiding cycles of three alternatives on the collective decision.

The main criticism to the aggregation of individual preferences under majority rules refers to the possibility of reaching inconsistent collective decisions from the election process. In these cases, the collective preference includes cycles and even could prevent the election of any alternative as the collective choice. The likelihood of consistent outcomes under a class of majority rules constitutes the aim of this paper. Specifically, we focus on majority rules that require certain consensus in individual preferences to declare an alternative as the winner. Under majorities based on difference of votes, the requirement asks to the winner alternative to obtain a difference in votes with respect to the loser alternative taking into account that individuals are endowed with weak preference orderings. Same requirement is asked to the restriction of these rules to individual linear preferences.