Nationally poor,locally rich: Income and local context in the 2016 presidential election

When social scientists examine relationships between income and voting decisions, their measures implicitly compare people to others in the national economic distribution. Yet an absolute income level (e.g., $57,617 per year, the 2016 national median) does not have the same meaning in Clay County, Georgia, where the 2016 median income was $22,100, as it does in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, where the median income was $224,000. We address this limitation by incorporating a measure of one's place in her ZIP code's income distribution. We apply this approach to the question of the relationship between income and whites' voting decisions in the 2016 presidential election, and test for generalizability in elections since 2000. The results show that Trump's support was concentrated among nationally poor whites but also among locally affluent whites, complicating claims about the role of income in that election. This pattern suggests that social scientists would do well to conceive of income in relative terms: relative to one's neighbors.     

An extension of Black's theorem on voting orders to the successive procedure

Duncan Black (1958) stated his voting order theorem — ‘the later any motion enters the voting order, the greater its chance of adoption’ — exclusively for the amendment procedure. Niemi and Gretlein's (1985) extension is similarly limited. Here we show that with a change in the focus from social preferences to individual preferences, both Black's theorem and that proved by Niemi and Gretlein apply as well to the successive procedure.     

Using factions to estimate preference intensity: Improving upon one person/one vote

In many elections, individuals are given two alternatives and are asked to indicate which of the two they prefer. These votes are then tabulated using one person/one vote and the alternative with the most votes becomes the public choice. Can we improve upon this system? If we change the election system and get more information on voter preference intensities, there are a number of better systems: demand revelation schemes, logrolling, Borda Voting etc. But suppose we can't change the way in which voters cast their ballots; suppose we are only allowed to change the way in which votes are tabulated. Is there a better system? Generally there is one extra bit of information — usually considered incidental — which comes with an individual's vote: his voting address. But voting address tells us something about the interest groups to which the individual may belong. As this paper shows, we can use this information to devise a better way of tabulating votes. This new system generally gives individuals from moderately cohesive voting regions more voting weight than individuals from either mildly cohesive or highly cohesive voting regions.     

Valence characteristics, costly policy and the median-crossing property: A diagrammatic exposition

Voters value valence characteristics such as honesty and competence. In this paper, we consider the situation where candidates may have more than one valence characteristic of importance to the voters. At the same time we introduce a new concept “the median-crossing property" which differs from single-peakedness and is less restrictive than the single-crossing property. If indifference curves satisfy the median-crossing property, then voting is transitive and the majority's preference rankings coincide with those of the median voter; if the indifference curves violate the median-crossing property, then intransitivity may arise. The framework also allows us to consider elections with costly policy.     

The consequences of political disagreement in interpersonal communication: New insights from a comparative perspective

Political disagreement in interpersonal communication increases attitudinal ambivalence and can depress voter turnout. These effects seem to be driven by a wish to avoid social controversy rather than informational gains from encountering other opinions. This article shows that political disagreement in interpersonal communication increases the difficulty of deciding for which party to vote. Moreover, this effect is a result of social disapproval of one's party preference, while political expertise in interpersonal communication has no effect. For voter turnout, no direct effect of social disapproval of one's party preference is found. However, disapproval has an indirect influence on turnout via difficulty of vote choice. In sum, both political attitudes and political behaviour are affected by social pressures. Students of political attitudes and behaviour should try to include interpersonal discussion in their models in greater detail than is common practice today.     

A general constitutional possibility theorem

Arrow's Impossibility Theorem shows that there exist no transitive social preferences in nonoligarchic societies for all possible profiles of individual preference orderings. Similarly, a generalization of Sen's Theorem of the Impossibility of a Paretian Liberal implies under the same conditions that non-Pareto-optimal outcomes may be present in the resulting cyclical preference relations. This essay changes the customary perspective. It demonstrates that, for any profile of individual preferences, we can always find a nonoligarchic assignment of rights to different subsets of society, to decide between pairs of outcomes, together with adequate decision rules, which escapes these problems. This assignment of rights can be a purely liberal one even for each profile, but not one in which everybody participates in all decisions and which uses simple or qualified-majority voting (Total Direct Democracy). The adequate purely liberal constitution, on the other hand, may imply an oligarchy if too few outcomes are present.     

Setting the record straight: A note on sophisticated voting under Borda's method

The purpose of this note is to correct some inaccuracies in the literature regarding sophisticated voting under Borda's method. It is shown that if a single candidate must be elected and voters vote sophisticatedly under Borda's method, then: (1) Contrary to both Black's (1976) and Ludwin's (1978) claims, a voter's undominated voting strategy may require him not to give top ranking to his most preferred candidate; (2) Contrary to Black's (1976) claim, an undominated strategy may be such that all candidates except the most preferred one are ranked last; (3) Whereas a candidate who constitutes the true bottom preference of an absolute majority of the voters will never be elected if voters vote sincerely, this candidate may be elected if voters vote strategically; (4) The election of a candidate who constitutes the true top preference of an absolute majority of the voters is not systematic: ceteris paribus this candidate may be definitely elected when voters vote sincerely but not when they vote strategically, as well as vice versa.     

The global economic crisis and domestic political agendas

There is an ongoing debate within the economic voting literature about whether the economy's salience systematically fluctuates over time or is constant. The recent global economic slowdown provides leverage to test the proposition that voters give greater weight to economic performance when it is weak. Data on voters' issue priorities from 2000 to 2011 shows that voters were more likely to consider the economy an important issue during periods of bad or volatile economic performance. A weak economy also focuses voter attention on corruption and crime while reducing attention to social policy and foreign affairs. Crime rates, terrorist attacks, globalization, and the level of development also affect the economy's place on the electoral agenda. Thus one impact of the recent financial downturn was a shift toward economic voting in countries where it was deepest.     

Tacit co-operation in three-alternative non-cooperative voting games: A new model of sophisticated behaviour under the plurality procedure

Two models, one due to Farquharson and the other to Niemi-Frank, attempt to account for sophisticated voting behaviour when the voters' preference orderings are common knowledge and communication among Voters is impossible. Having subjected these two models to experimental testing, we have found them lacking. Hence, we propose a new model of sophisticated voting for 3-alternative n-person non-cooperative games under the plurality procedure, which can be extended to other voting procedures and more than three alternatives.The model assumes that voters whose first preference is (one of) the Condorcet winner(s) will (tacitly) co-ordinate their strategies and vote for their first preference, and specifies the conditions under which voters whose second preference is (one of) the Condorcet winner(s) will vote for their second (rather than their first) preference. Consequently, our model predicts that: (i) if there is a single Condorcet winner he or she will be elected; (ii) if there is more than one Condorcet winner the final outcome will be a tie between them; and (iii) when there are cyclical majorities with a single maximin alternative, this alternative will be elected.     

Is compulsory voting habit-forming? Regression discontinuity evidence from Brazil

Voting in one election increases one's propensity to vote in the future. It remains unclear, however, whether this pattern holds when voting is compulsory – as is the case in a quarter of all democracies. Is compulsory voting habit-forming? I address this question using a regression discontinuity design and administrative turnout data from Brazil, where voting is voluntary at age 16 and compulsory at age 18. I find no evidence that compulsory voting instils voting habits. Instead, the evidence points to a first-time compulsory voting boost, which gradually dissipates as voters grow older. I show that targeted mobilisation of first-time compulsory voters is a plausible mechanism behind the turnout boost. Alternative explanations find less support in the data. The results clarify the scope conditions of prior research on voting habits, and have important implications for the debate over the second-order effects of compulsory voting.     

A Conditional Defense of Plurality Rule: Generalizing May's Theorem in a Restricted Informational Environment

May's theorem famously shows that, in social decisions between two options, simple majority rule uniquely satisfies four appealing conditions. Although this result is often cited in support of majority rule, it has never been extended beyond decisions based on pairwise comparisons of options. We generalize May's theorem to many-option decisions where voters each cast one vote. Surprisingly, plurality rule uniquely satisfies May's conditions. This suggests a conditional defense of plurality rule: If a society's balloting procedure collects only a single vote from each voter, then plurality rule is the uniquely compelling electoral procedure. To illustrate the conditional nature of this claim, we also identify a richer informational environment in which approval voting, not plurality rule, is supported by a May-style argument.     

First or Second Order Referendums? Understanding the Votes on the EU Constitutional Treaty in Four EU Member States

This article uses post-referendum Flash-Eurobarometer surveys to analyse empirically voter attitudes towards the EU Constitution in four member states. The theoretical model used incorporates first and second order variables for voting to ascertain whether the outcome of the vote was a reflection of either first or second order voting behaviour. It is hypothesised that the cleavage politics over integration in the European arena had a major impact on the four votes, as captured by three first order variables: ‘Europhile’ and ‘Constitution-phile’ attitudes and ‘Egocentric Europeanness’, respectively. The quantitative analyses – controlling for a number of dimensions – strongly supports the hypothesis when compared with a model using solely second order party identification variables. These findings establish that how voters understood the EU polity, in particular whether membership is beneficial to one's own country, was a crucial factor in all the referendums. Implications for future research include the need to discover the cues or proxies influencing first order voting within domestic politics.     

Why Progressives Should be Pro‐Family

For egalitarians, families are part of the problem. By bringing together advantages and passing on to their children, families redouble and (literally) reproduce inequalities. And, by cordoning off a private sphere into which government cannot roam, the family marks the limits of any progressive agenda. But defending families should be part of any answer to social injustice. Family relationships should be seen as a primary good: we need close, caring committed relationships no matter what else we want in life. Families are also increasingly important to one's chances in life. The gulf is widening between those rich and those poor in family life. This should worry egalitarians because lacking good, stable family relationships is a major disadvantage, and one that holds back progress towards other aspects of social justice.     

Agendas and sincerity: a second response to Schwartz

An Ordeshook-Schwartz agenda tree requires a voting theorist to assign a unique “ostensive alternative” to each node, but under some non-pairwise agendas there is no evident principle by which to do this. Therefore Ordeshook-Schwartz sincere voting is not clearly defined under all types of agendas. Farquharson-style agenda trees sidestep this problem and allow one or more definitions of sincere voting under every type of agenda.     

Voting Rules,Manipulability and Social Homogeneity

To what extent are some voting rules more vulnerable tostrategic manipulation than others? In order to answer thisquestion, representations are developed for the coalitionalmanipulability of eight voting rules under various assumptionsconcerning the likelihood that given voters' preferenceprofiles are observed on three alternatives. Of particularinterest is the impact that social homogeneity (defined as thetendency of voters' preference to be similar) has on themanipulability of voting rules. The results we obtain showthat the hierarchy of the voting rules that results from ourcomputations can crucially depend on the degree of socialhomogeneity. However, it turns out that, whatever the degreeof homogeneity, the Hare method (or two-stage plurality)minimizes susceptibility to strategic manipulation bycoalitions of voters in three-candidate elections.

     

Taking dictatorship seriously: a reply to Quesada

Antonio Quesada (Public Choice 130:395–400, 2007) argues that a dictator has no more than two to three times the ‘average power’ of a non-dictatorial voter. If Quesada is correct, then his argument has major consequences for social choice theory; for instance, it warrants reconsidering the significance of Arrow’s Theorem. If Quesada is incorrect, however, then his position is dangerously misleading. This paper argues that Quesada is wrong. His argument depends on his own formal account of power, an account that is implausible because it disregards a basic insight common to the standard characterisations of voting power: the idea that one has power over an outcome to the extent that one is able to change that outcome. Claims about power have a counterfactual component; to assert that an individual actually has determined an outcome is also to make an assertion about what would have been the case had that individual acted differently. We can employ David Lewis’s influential account of counterfactuals to show, contra Quesada, that in a dictatorship, non-dictatorial individuals and groups cannot possibly determine a social preference. In short, Quesada is fundamentally mistaken about power, and thus also about the distribution of power in a dictatorship.     

Winning Coalition Formation in the U.S. Senate: The Effects of Legislative Decision Rules and Agenda Change

Recent empirical work has brought a renewed attention to the effect congressional rules of procedure have on the size of winning coalitions. Specifically, scholars have posited that legislative success hinges on the support of legislators identified by institutionally defined decision rules. Under these theories, supermajority decision rules in the U.S. Senate lead to larger, more inclusive coalitions on final passage. In this article, I reevaluate these claims by controlling for changes in the legislative agenda and the roll‐call voting record. I find that the aggregate size of winning coalitions is highly responsive to the underlying legislative agenda, the size of the Senate's majority party, and the manner in which researchers treat unrecorded votes. Further, my findings suggest that any connection between changes in the Senate's voting rules and the size of winning coalitions is spurious. Eric Schickler and Gregory J. Wawro have authored a response to this article, and Anthony J. Madonna has authored a rejoinder to this response. Both are available as Supporting Information .     

The Party Faithful: Partisan Images,Candidate Religion,and the Electoral Impact of Party Identification

We argue that the factors shaping the impact of partisanship on vote choice—“partisan voting”—depend on the nature of party identification. Because party identification is partly based on images of the social group characteristics of the parties, the social profiles of political candidates should affect levels of partisan voting. A candidate's religious affiliation enables a test of this hypothesis. Using survey experiments which vary a hypothetical candidate's religious affiliation, we find strong evidence that candidates’ religions can affect partisan voting. Identifying a candidate as an evangelical (a group viewed as Republican) increases Republican support for, and Democratic opposition to, the candidate, while identifying the candidate as a Catholic (a group lacking a clear partisan profile) has no bearing on partisan voting. Importantly, the conditional effect of candidate religion on partisan voting requires the group to have a salient partisan image and holds with controls for respondents’ own religious affiliations and ideologies.     

Cycle avoiding trajectories,strategic agendas,and the duality of memory and foresight: An informal exposition

This paper considers the notion of cycle avoiding trajectories in majority voting tournaments and shows that they underlie and guide several apparently disparate voting processes. The set of alternatives that are maximal with respect to such trajectories constitutes a new solution set of considerable significance. It may be dubbed the Banks set, in recognition of the important paper by Banks (1985) that first made use of this set. The purpose of this paper is to informally demonstrate that the Banks set is a solution set of broad relevance for understanding group decision making in both cooperative and non-cooperative settings and under both sincere and sophisticated voting. In addition, we show how sincere and sophisticated voting processes can be viewed as mirror images of one another — embodying respectively, “dmemory” and “foresight.” We also show how to develop the idea of a “sophisticated agenda,” one in which the choice of what alternatives to propose is itself a matter of strategic calculation.     

Identifying the bandwagon effect in two-round elections

Albert Heckscher (1857–1897) was a Danish lawyer. In his dissertation (Bidrag till Grundlæggelse af en Afstemningslære), accepted in 1892 at the University of Copenhagen, Heckscher dealt with numerous issues related to voting, especially those related to vote-aggregation in parliaments, courts and committees. He knew the works of Condorcet and Borda quite well, and analyzed many topics that would nowadays fall into the domain of the theory of social choice. These include Condorcet-cycles, differences between Condorcet-effective rules and the Borda rule, strategic voting, the influence of the voting order under the parliamentary voting rules, the likelihood of single-peaked preference profiles, and the problems created by non-separable preferences. Heckscher’s treatment of the Judgment Aggregation Paradox is especially noteworthy. Although Kornhauser and Sager (Yale Law Journal 96: 82–117, 1986) are usually mentioned as the inventors of this problem, Heckscher’s earlier treatment confirms the suspicion that the problem is not of recent origin. Numerous issues studied in the post-Arrowian theory of voting may already be found in Heckscher’s dissertation; some of them have become subjects of systematic study only in the twenty-first century. It is argued that Albert Heckscher, the unknown nineteenth century Danish lawyer, deserves a place in the pantheon of the theory of social choice alongside his better known contemporaries Charles Dodgson and E. J. Nanson.