The problem of indeterminacy in approval,multiple, and truncated voting systems

It is well known that a plurality election need not reflect the true sentiments of the electorate. Some of the proposed reform procedures, such as approval and cumulative voting, share the characteristics that there are several ways to tally each voter's preferences. Voting systems that permit truncated ballots share this feature. It is shown that the election results for any such procedure can be highly indeterminate; all possible election results can occur with the same choice of sincere voters. This conclusion of indeterminacy holds even when measures of voters' sentiments, such as the existence of a Condorcet winner or even much stronger measures, indicate there is considerable agreement among the voters. Then, multiple systems are compared with all standard tallying procedures. For instance, a corollary asserts it is probable for the plurality voting method to elect the Condorcet winner while approval voting has an indeterminate outcome.The work of both authors was supported, in part, by NSF Grant IST 8415348. This work was partially stimulated by comments concerning the assertions about approval voting and other systems that are discussed in (Saari, 1987). In particular, we are pleased to thank S. Brams, Carl Simon, and the other participants for their questions after one of us presented (Saari, 1987) at the July, 1984, Workshop on Mathematical Models in Political Science held at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.     

Correct Voting in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Nominating Elections

Criticisms of the system by which the American political parties select their candidates focus on issues of representativeness—how choices are dominated by relatively small numbers of ideologically extreme primary voters, or how residents of small states voting early in the process have disproportionate influence. This paper adds a different concern, albeit one that still addresses representativeness. How well do primary and caucus voters represent their own values and interests with their vote choices? Lau and Redlawsk’s notion of “correct voting” is applied to the 2008 U.S. nominating contests. Four reasons to expect levels of correct voting to be lower in caucus and primary elections than in general election campaigns are discussed. Results suggest that voters in U.S. nominating contests do much worse than voters in general election campaigns, often barely doing better than chance in selecting the candidate who best represents their own values and priorities. Discussion focuses on institutional reforms that should improve citizens’ ability to make correct voting choices in caucuses and primaries.     

Estimating relative prevalence of competing issue voting rules in multiparty elections using finite mixture modeling

How do citizens of democratic polities translate their policy preferences into voting choices? Proximity and directional theories of issue voting offer different answers to this question that have strong implications for parties’ strategies. Controlled scenarios in imaginary two-candidate contests have gained popularity as a method to estimate proportions of proximity and directional voters in the population. However, this method is not always applicable in comparative research where scholars often have to study multiparty elections with observational data. In the present paper, I demonstrate how relative prevalence of different issue voting rules can be estimated using finite mixture modeling. Using both a paradigmatic and a recent case, I demonstrate that the mixture model predicts observed voting choices better than the alternatives. I also show how finite mixture modeling can be used to study individual-level characteristics of proximity and directional voters using education as an example.     

Endogenous choice of amendment agendas: types of voters and experimental evidence

A stylized model of three parties choosing an amendment agenda and voting over three policy alternatives is analyzed. The analysis yields a classification of five types of voters: random, sincere, strategic, risk-averse, and EUS (expected utility sophisticated) proposed by Enelow (J. Polit. 43:1062–1089, 1981). Laboratory experiments suggest that the choice of agendas can be partially explained by the sincere voting model (26% of voters) and strategic voting model (47% of voters), even when players’ preferences are common knowledge. Risk-aversion may explain choices of up to 56% of the voters. Finally, the EUS voting model explains up to 73% of the observed voting behavior.     

Spatial voting in non-partisan cities: A case study

In spatial voting theory, voters choose the candidate whose policy preferences are most like their own. This requires that (a) voters and candidates have policy preferences that can be meaningfully summarized in terms of low-dimensional “ideal points” on a left-right scale; (b) voters are able to discern, either directly or through relevant cues, the ideal points of the candidates who are running for office; and (c) voters incorporate this information into the choices they make at the ballot box. Perhaps more than in any other elections, it is not clear that any of these requirements are met in non-partisan municipal elections: policy preferences may not be ideologically structured, information may be inadequate, and voters may choose candidates for reasons other than ideology. This makes non-partisan municipal elections an especially hard test for spatial voting theory. Using novel data from both municipal candidates and eligible voters in a major non-partisan municipal election in Canada, we show that municipal policy attitudes are ideologically structured and that these municipal policy ideal points are strongly related to mayoral and council vote choice. Thus, despite the institutional and informational obstacles, spatial voting can play an important role in non-partisan municipal elections.     

Do electoral rules have an effect on electoral behaviour? An impact assessment

Abstract

Electoral democracies worldwide are all organised around elections but the rules under which the elections are organised differ greatly from one country to another. These electoral rules, such as whether voting is compulsory or what electoral system is used, are thought of as strongly affecting voters’ behaviour and the choices they make. If electoral rules indeed shape citizens’ electoral behaviour, the implication is that theories of what explains voters’ choices are country-specific as well. This is in sharp contrast to the idea that theories of electoral behaviour are generalisable. This special issue tackles this question and offers an assessment of the impact of electoral rules on voters’ behaviour, on the one hand, and the generalisability of individual-level theories of voting behaviour, on the other. The collection of papers furthermore offers an important contribution in terms of the kind of electoral rules that are scrutinised, with several papers focusing on the little-investigated phenomenon of preferential voting.     

Modeling the influence of polls on elections: a population dynamics approach

We propose a population dynamics model for quantifying the effects of polling data on the outcome of multi-party elections decided by a majority-rule voting process. We divide the population into two groups: committed voters impervious to polling data, and susceptible voters whose decision to vote is influenced by data, depending on its reliability. This population-based approach to modeling the process sidesteps the problem of upscaling models based upon the choices made by individuals. We find releasing poll data is not advantageous to leading candidates, but it can be exploited by those closely trailing. The analysis identifies the particular type of voting impetus at play in different stages of an election and could help strategists optimize their influence on susceptible voters.     

How do established voters react to new parties? The case of Italy, 1985–2008

The Italian party system largely collapsed in the early 1990s, providing us with a natural experimental situation in which voters were confronted with new parties – indeed, with an entirely new party system. How did they react? This paper develops a number of expectations on the basis of existing theory and tests these expectations using a dataset consisting of election studies conducted in Italy between 1985 and 2008. We find that a new party system causes confusion as to where parties stand in left-right terms, making it difficult for voters to make their choices on the basis of ideological cues. The confusion is greatest among older voters – those already set in their habits of voting, but only the very oldest cohorts (containing voters over 60 years old) are significantly debilitated.     

Manipulability of voting by sincere truncation of preferences

A weak form of strategic voting, called ‘sincere truncation,’ occurs when a voter with a strict preference ranking does not rank all his or her choices on the ballot. A voting procedure is said to be manipulable by sincere truncation if one or more voters can obtain a preferred outcome through sincere truncation. Voting procedures that are not manipulable by sincere truncation are shown to be incompatible with the election of Condorcet (majority) candidates when they exist. A relaxation of simple majority rule, called the ‘7/12 rule,’ is also shown to conflict with nonmanipulability when additional conditions are imposed. These results are formally independent of the strategy-proofness theorems for voting and decision schemes established by Gibbard, Satterthwaite, and others. While their analyses are more inclusive in terms of the varieties of decision procedures allowed, they are also less demanding in their requirements for manipulability since voters are permitted to reverse sincere pReferences in their voting. Thus, plurality voting is manipulable in the sense of Gibbard-Satterthwaite (by preference reversals), but it is clearly nonmanipulable by sincere truncation.     

Voting at 16: Turnout and the quality of vote choice

Critics of giving citizens under 18 the right to vote argue that such teenagers lack the ability and motivation to participate effectively in elections. If this argument is true, lowering the voting age would have negative consequences for the quality of democracy. We test the argument using survey data from Austria, the only European country with a voting age of 16 in nation-wide elections. While the turnout levels of young people under 18 are relatively low, their failure to vote cannot be explained by a lower ability or motivation to participate. In addition, the quality of these citizens' choices is similar to that of older voters, so they do cast votes in ways that enable their interests to be represented equally well. These results are encouraging for supporters of a lower voting age.     

The Accuracy of Recalled Previous Voting: Evidence from Norwegian Election Study Panels

Data on individual variations from one election to the next is fundamental in the study of political behaviour, and should, ideally, be collected through panel studies in which the same people are interviewed at two or more or elections. This method is, however, costly and time consuming, and most analyses of this type are therefore based on recall data, in which the voters report their choices in the current election and also in previous elections. The accuracy of recall data is discussed, based on data from the Norwegian Programme of Election Research in the period 1977–97. Analyses show that one must expect, using this type of data, that about one in four voters will give incorrect information about their voting behaviour at the previous election. Erroneous recall of previous voting can be explained by variations in the voters' affiliation to the parties. Whereas stable voters who remain with the same party normally report their voting correctly, erroneous recall varies around 40 percent for party changers and rises to 70 percent among previous non-voters. There is, however, no uniform underlying pattern in erroneous recall during different periods, which implies that it is difficult to predict exactly how erroneous recall will affect the accuracy of recall data in one particular election.     

The effect of the secret ballot on voter turnout rates

Secrecy in the voting process eliminated an important motivation for voting. No longer able to verify the voters' choices, political parties stopped offering payments in return for votes. Within the rational voter framework, it will be shown that these payments were a prime impetus for people to vote. Without a vote market to cover their voting costs, many voters were rational to stay away from the polls. This hypothesis is supported through a series of empirical tests culminating in a multivariate legislative regression. When other electoral laws are controlled for, the secret ballot accounts for 7 percentage points lower Gubernatorial turnout.     

Racial or Spatial Voting? The Effects of Candidate Ethnicity and Ethnic Group Endorsements in Local Elections

With the growth of Latino and Asian American populations, candidates frequently must appeal to diverse electorates. Strategies for doing so include emphasizing candidates’ racial/ethnic identity and securing endorsements from racial/ethnic groups. While many scholars focus on candidates’ racial/ethnic attributes, ethnic group endorsements are understudied. Whether such endorsements induce voters to choose ideologically similar candidates (spatial voting), or choose based on race/ethnicity (racial voting) is unclear. We address this question by examining elections in multiethnic local settings. Using original surveys and exit polls, we create comparable measures of candidate and voter ideology, and examine how race/ethnicity and ideology affect voters’ choices. We also embed experiments that manipulate ethnic group endorsements. We find that ideology influences voters’ choices, but that ethnic group endorsements weaken spatial voting. The latter effect among whites is driven by racial/ethnic stereotypes. These reactions explain why some candidates seek such endorsements and why others might prefer to avoid them.     

The Mostly-Sovereign People: Sophisticated Voting and Public Opinion About Term Limits in California

This study finds that citizens are capable of purposeful issue and sophisticated voting in referendum elections. These conclusions are drawn from an analysis of the 1990 vote for term limits in California. As theory suggests, the voting public in California does not live up to some idealized picture of decision makers with complete information, but rather they rely on partisan cues and their own underlying policy preferences to help decide on a voting strategy for term limits. This suggests that voters are capable of making complex and sophisticated choices about politics. If problems exist with the current system of initiative and referendum in California, the problems are not endemic but are found in the implementation of this particular version of direct democracy.     

Supersized votes: ballot length, uncertainty, and choice in direct legislation elections

Voters in polities that make heavy use of direct democracy are frequently confronted with ballots that contain a multitude of propositions. Claims that direct legislation elections overwhelm voters with choices they are not competent to make should particularly apply to such demanding settings. Yet, evidence on the effects of lengthy ballots on voting behavior is scant. This study reviews theories of decision-making under uncertainty, and tests their predictions in a mixed heteroscedastic model of vote choice that is fitted to a unique collection of survey and contextual data on Swiss referendums. Increasing ballot length is demonstrated to interfere with the voters’ ability to translate their political preferences into consistent policy choices.     

Voting for government coalitions in Ireland under single transferable vote

This paper addresses the issue of whether voters indicate a preference for a government rather than, or in addition to a preference for a party, when they cast a ballot under the system of the single transferable vote (STV). It thus contributes to the existing literature on strategic coalition voting by examining whether coalition preferences matter where electors are given the option to rank the parties in order of preference. The question then becomes: does this ranking reflect or signal a coalition preference? Using survey data from two Irish elections, this paper finds that whereas first preferences are closely aligned with coalition choices, Irish voters do not systematically use second preferences to express a view on their preferred coalition formation.     

Split ticket voting in the 1995 Russian Duma elections

High levels of split ticket voting in elections usually indicate either an instrumental electorate, or widespread disaffection from the major parties. Elections to the Russian lower house, the Duma, permit voters both party list options and single-member ballots; as a result, the 1993 and 1995 Duma elections recorded some of the highest levels of split ticket voting ever recorded. Using national survey data collected just after the 1995 Duma election, we test two major explanations for split ticket voting, one based on the activities of voters, the other on the strategic behaviour of parties. The results show that split ticket voting is caused by voters, and more specifically, by their weak attachments to parties. But party strategy also plays a modest role in promoting the phenomenon. In the absence of major reform of the Russian electoral system, split ticket voting is likely to remain at high levels.     

Will quadratic voting produce optimal public policy?

Public Choice - Under quadratic voting people are able to buy votes with money. The claims that rational voters will make efficient electoral choices rest on assumptions about how voters acquire...     

The more,the better? Counterfactual evidence on the effect of compulsory voting on the consistency of party choice

Compulsory voting (CV) undoubtedly raises electoral turnout. Yet does it also affect individual party choices and aggregate election outcomes? Previous studies have focused on partisan or ‘directional’ effects of CV in favour of, for example, social‐democratic or anti‐establishment parties. These effects are usually small, however. Using survey data from the Belgian General Elections Study, this article finds that CV primarily affects the consistency, rather than the direction, of party choices. In particular, the analyses suggest that CV compels a substantial share of uninterested and less knowledgeable voters to the polls. These voters, in turn, cast votes that are clearly less consistent with their own political preferences than those of the more informed and motivated voluntary voters. Claims that CV promotes equal representation of political interests are therefore questionable.     

Between first and second order: A comparison of voting behaviour in European and local elections in Britain

Abstract. In Britain, both local elections and European elections can be regarded as second–order. However, voters believe that even less is at stake in European elections than in local elections, and their behaviour is congruent with this: voters are more likely to turn out in local elections, they are more likely to 'split their ticket' they are more likely to report that they vote on issues specific to the second–order arena. Logistic regression of party choices in the local, European and national contexts confirms this. National considerations played less part in the local election and there was some evidence that voters were influenced by the record of the locally–incumbent party. It appears that voting in the European elections has more of an expressive character, and is less instrumental than that in either local or national elections.