Voting methods, problems of majority rule, and demand-revealing procedures

Gordon Tullock made fundamental conceptual contributions to the understanding of collective choices. Tullock balanced an optimism about the capacity of political choices to facilitate gains from exchange with a pessimism about the negative externalities attending having majorities control power and dictate choices for all. Tullock’s work on both sides of this divide is surveyed, examining both the problems of voting procedures, and the promise of the demand-revealing process he helped invent, in guiding the choice of political institutions.     

An experimental study of the efficiency of unanimity rule and majority rule

Scholars traditionally claim that unanimity rule is more capable of producing Pareto optimal outcomes than majority rule. Dougherty and Edward (Public Choice 151(3):655–678, 2012) make the opposite claim assuming proposals are either random, sincere, or strategic. We test these competing hypotheses in a two-dimensional framework using laboratory experiments. Our primary results suggest: (1) majority rule enters the Pareto set more quickly than unanimity rule, (2) majority rule leaves the Pareto set at the same rate as unanimity rule, and (3) majority rule is more likely to select a Pareto optimal outcome than unanimity rule at the end of the game.     

The majority vote rule and runoff primaries in the United States

The major parties in the United States use primary elections to select party candidates for general elections. While most employ a simple plurality vote rule for this purpose, some states, primarily southern, employ a majority rule that requires a runoff between the top two vote recipients if no candidate receives a majority in the initial primary. Data on primaries for state Governor and U.S. Senator from 1980 to 2002 are used to examine contemporary concerns about runoffs. Included in the findings are (1) the problem that majority runoffs address – candidates being selected based on low levels of voter support is not a frequent outcome under the plurality rule; (2) the vast majority of selections is based on a majority of votes in a primary, regardless of whether a simple plurality or majority is required; and (3) runoff primaries are necessary in roughly one-third of the contested primaries held in the majority vote context, and in about one-third of them the primary leader loses the runoff.     

Note on rent-seeking and committees using a proportionate-sharing rule

The paper examines how the effort expended in pursuit of rents may be affected by having the rents awarded by either an individual or a committee, under differing allocation rules. Congleton (1984) found that rent-seeking efforts should be markedly lower when rents are awarded by committees rather than by a single administrator. This paper reexamines the proportionate-sharing rule, and finds that, depending on decision-making norms followed by committee members, allocation by committee may result in rent-seeking expenditures that are less than, equal to, or greater than those where rents are proportionately divided by a single administrator.     

The fairness of discounting: A majority rule approach

A model of majority rule is developed in which each of a finite number of generations votes on a redistribution of income between itself and the other generations. In voting, each generation expresses tastes for its own income and for the distribution of income across generations. The model is then used to derive the conditions under which discounting is justified — namely those conditions for which the majority rule exhibits a positive marginal rate of time preference. It is demonstrated that when each generation is wealthier than those preceding it, the parameters representing the taste for income equality must be relatively high for the majority rule to exhibit a positive marginal rate of time preference.     

Probability calculations for transitivity of simple majority rule with anonymous voters

Let P(n, 4) denote the probability that there is a pairwise simple majority rule winner on four candidates with n voters under the impartial anonymous culture condition. Similarly, let P^t(n, 4) denote the probability that the complete ranking obtained by pairwise simple majority voting on four candidates with n voters is transitive under the impartial anonymous culture condition. We obtain representations for P(n, 4) and P^t(n, 4), and computed values for each for odd n with 3 n 19.This research was supported through a fellowship from the Center for Advanced Study, University of Delaware.     

Committee choice and the core under supramajority rule: Results from simulation of majority choice in 2-dimensional space

While simple-majority choice by committees is generally unstable, supramajority rule has been demonstrated to yield nonempty sets of stable outcomes: outcomes in the core. This paper reports results of a computer simulation of majority choice by committees under supramajority rule. The object is to explore the transition from unstable to stable committee choice with increasing supramajority rules. The findings are that supramajority rule limits the instability of committee choice; that stable committee choice is no more predictable than unstable committee choice; and that an optimal supramajority rule can be specified which minimizes instability and maximizes the predictability of committee choice. In all of the results, simple-majority rule plays virtually no role.     

The broken bridge of public finance: majority rule,earmarked taxes and social engineering

Public Choice - A theoretically grounded approach to causal questions illuminates both the utility and limitations of the potential outcomes (PO) framework as a model for historically-focused,...     

Participation and voting in committees: Evidence from the ILO

Although many international organisations are formally built on the principle of ‘one country–one vote’, the lack of representativeness in decision-making may give a subgroup of members disproportionate influence. Using data on participation and voting in 51 decision-making committees of the International Labour Organization (ILO), we do find a bias in voting outcomes due to committee composition. Recent theoretical research has argued that voters with extreme preferences may self-select into committees. A procedure is proposed to test for this prediction. There is no indication that governments with extreme preferences are drawn disproportionately into ILO committees.     

Congressional committees and the political economy of federal outlays

The literature on the organization of the United States Congress has been dominated by “distributive” and “informational” theory. One important source of disagreement between these two theories is their characterization of whether individual legislators can engage in pork-barrel activities. Here we provide evidence which indicates that the pork-barrel is alive and well in the contemporary United States Congress. We focus on whether members of power and constituency committees can direct disproportionate federal expenditures to their districts. Finding strong and systematic evidence of pork-barrel activities by committee members provides empirical support for distributive theories of legislative organization.     

Determinants of legislative success in House committees

We examine the factors that are associated with whether a bill passes the committee stage in the U.S. House of Representatives. Probit results for the 97th and 98th Congresses show that a bill is more likely to pass (1) if the sponsor chairs the committee that considers the bill or a subcommittee of that committee; (2) the higher the number of Democratic cosponsors who sit on the committee; (3) if the bill has bipartisan cosponsorship from members who sit on the committee that considers the bill. However, in the multivariate probit model including the above mentioned variables, other variables previously found to be important, e.g., the total number of cosponsors, whether or not the sponsor sits on the committee that considers the bill, and the party affiliation of the sponsor, are not statistically significant. Also a variable related to a public choice model of committee behavior, the difference between the sponsor's ideology (as measured by ADA score) and the ideology of the committee's median member, has no effect on a bill's probability of committee passage.     

德治与法治关系再辨析

德治和法治的关系是一个古老而崭新的话题,古往今来,有关的论述不胜枚举,本文试从二者所具有的一致性、兼容性、互补性和互济性等四个方面来进一步辨析二者的关系,从而为我国正在实施的德法兼治提供理论依据.