Codifications of complete preorders that are compatible with Mahalanobis disconsensus measures

We introduce the use of the Mahalanobis distance for the analysis of the cohesiveness of a group of linear orders or complete preorders. We prove that arbitrary codifications of the preferences are incompatible with this formulation, while affine transformations permit to compare profiles on the basis of such a proposal. This measure seems especially fit for the cases where the alternatives are correlated, e.g., committee selection when the candidates are affiliated to political parties.