Hahn polynomials and the Burnside process

We study a natural Markov chain on $\{0,1,\cdots ,n\}$ with eigenvectors the Hahn polynomials. This explicit diagonalization makes it possible to get sharp rates of convergence to stationarity. The process, the Burnside process, is a special case of the celebrated Swendsen-Wang' or data augmentation’ algorithm. The description involves the beta-binomial distribution and Mallows model on permutations. It introduces a useful generalization of the Burnside process.