A precise restatement and extension of Black's theorem on voting orders

Duncan Black originally suggested that ‘the later any motion enters the voting, the greater its chance of adoption.’ We formalize this reasoning as a theorem, which we prove. We then specify the implications of this theorem for agenda control. If the social preference is known and there is no majority winner, one is best off choosing a specific voting order, which may or may not have one's most preferred alternative last. If the social preference is unknown, the optimal agenda is one in which voting is in reverse order of one's preferences.     

Research note Partial single-peakedness: An extension and clarification

Niemi (1969), in an important but neglected paper, found that when orderings were drawn from a simulation based on the impartial culture, the greater the proportion of voter orderings that were single-peaked (a condition he called partial single-peakedness), the more likely was there to be a transitive group ordering. Niemi also found that the likelihood of transitivity increased with n, group size — approaching one as n grew large. Niemi's simulation was restricted to the case of three alternatives. Also, he provided no theoretical explanation for the results of his simulation. Here we provide a theoretical explanation for Niemi's results in terms of a model based on the idea of net preferences, and we extend his results for the general case of any finite number of alternatives, m, for electorates that are large relative to the number of alternatives being considered. In addition to providing a rationale for Niemi's (1969) simulation results, the ideas of net preferences and opposite preference we make use of have a wide range of potential applications.     

Elections as poorer reflections of preferences under compulsory voting

Compulsory voting is known to increase electoral participation, but its second-order effects are not well established. In this paper, I argue that vote choices are a relatively poor reflection of individuals' preferences under compulsory voting, as it boosts participation among those who are unlikely to cast well-reasoned ballots—the politically disinterested and unknowledgeable and those who see elections as flawed or pointless. I test this expectation with cross-national survey data, and I conduct supplementary tests with regional survey data from Switzerland, which employs compulsory voting in select cantons. Results from both sets of analyses support my expectations, suggesting that elections conducted under compulsory rules are relatively unlikely to signal the preferences of the voting population.     

Expected utility or learned familiarity? The formation of voters' coalition preferences

In most modern parliamentary democracies, it is unlikely that single party governments will be formed, meaning that a voter's preferred party presumably has to share cabinet offices and negotiate policy compromises in a coalition government. This raises the question of how voters evaluate potential (coalition) governments, especially since recent studies have shown that coalition preferences influence voting behaviour. In this paper, we combine theories of voting behaviour, government formation and political learning to derive expectations regarding the factors that may impact voters' coalition preferences. We test our hypotheses by analysing survey data from the German federal and state levels. The results of a mixed logit regression analysis support our arguments: Voters' coalition preferences not only depend on the perceived policy distance between the positions of voters and the most distant party within combinations of parties, but also on predominant patterns of government formation.     

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.     

Tactical Voting and Party Preferences: A Test of Cognitive Dissonance Theory

Studying the development of stable political attitudes, political scientists have argued that repeated voting for a political party reinforces initial party preferences, in a seemingly mechanistic process of habit-formation. However, the empirical evidence is scarce and the theoretical framework underdeveloped. Does the act of voting for a party improve an individual’s evaluation of this party? If so, is this effect simply due to habit-formation, or a more complex psychological mechanism? Drawing on cognitive dissonance theory, we examine the act of voting as a choice inducing dissonance reduction. We go beyond existing research, by focusing on tactical voters—a group for which the notion of habitual reinforcement does not predict an effect. The analyses reveal a positive effect of the act of voting tactically on the preferences for the parties voted for and may thus call for a revision of the traditional understanding of the role of voting in shaping party preferences.     

Approval and plurality voting with uncertainty: Info-gap analysis of robustness

Voting algorithms are used to choose candidates by an electorate. However, voter participation is variable and uncertain, and projections from polls or past elections are uncertain because voter preferences may change. Furthermore, electoral victory margins are often slim. Variable voter participation or preferences, and slim margins of decision, have implications for choosing a voting algorithm. We focus on approval voting (AV) and compare it to plurality voting (PV), regarding their robustness to uncertainty in voting outcomes. We ask: by how much can voting outcomes change without altering the election outcomes? We see fairly consistent empirical differences between AV and PV. In single-winner elections, PV tends to be more robust to vote uncertainty than AV in races with large victory margins, while AV tends to be more robust at low victory margins. Two conflicting concepts—approval flattening and approval magnification—explain this tendency for reversal of robust dominance between PV and AV. We also examine the robustness to vote uncertainty of PV in elections for proportional representation of parties.

     

When Do the Rich Vote Less Than the Poor and Why? Explaining Turnout Inequality across the World

The conventional wisdom that the poor are less likely to vote than the rich is based upon research on voting behavior in advanced industrialized countries. However, in some places, the relationship between turnout and socioeconomic status is reversed. We argue that the potential tax exposure of the rich explains the positive relationship between income and voting in some places and not others. Where the rich anticipate taxation, they have a greater incentive to participate in politics, and politicians are more likely to use fiscal policy to gain support. We explore two factors affecting the tax exposure of the rich—the political salience of redistribution in party politics and the state's extractive capacity. Using survey data from developed and developing countries, we demonstrate that the rich turn out to vote at higher rates when the political preferences of the rich and poor diverge and where bureaucratic capacity is high.     

Quadratic election law

The standard form of electoral system in the United States—plurality voting with one person, one vote—suffers from countless defects, many of which stem from its failure to enable people to register the intensity of their preferences for political outcomes when they vote. Quadratic voting, an elegant alternative system proposed by Glen Weyl, provides a theoretically attractive solution to this problem but is an awkward fit with America’s legal and political traditions. We identify the legal barriers to the adoption of quadratic voting, discuss modified versions that could pass muster, and show how even a modified version would address many of the pathologies of the existing system.     

How elections matter: A study of U.S. senators

Policy representation implies not only congruence between constituent and representative preferences, but also the ability of representatives to perceive and adjust to changing constituent preferences. This paper examines the extent of such representation among U.S. senators. It shows that a senator's voting behavior strongly affects his chances of election, but that senators demonstrate only a limited ability to adapt to changing constituent preferences.     

Arrow's theorem with social quasi-orderings

The collective rationality requirement in Arrow's theorem is weakened to demanding a social quasi-ordering (a reflexive and transitive but not necessarily complete binary relation). This weakening leads to the existence of a group such that (a) whenever all members of the group strictly prefer one alternative to another then so does society and (b) whenever two members of the group have opposite strict preferences over a pair of alternatives then the pair is socially not ranked. This theorem is then used to provide an axiomatization of the strong Pareto rule. These results are compared and contrasted to Gibbard's oligarchy theorem and Sen's axiomatization of the Pareto extension rule.     

Democracy for all: restoring immigrant voting rights in the US

This paper examines the politics of noncitizen voting in the United States. It is not widely known that noncitizens currently vote in local elections in Maryland and in Chicago; nor that over the past decade campaigns to expand the franchise to noncitizens have been launched in at least a dozen other jurisdictions from coast to coast. These practices have their roots in another little known fact: for most of the country's history—from the founding until the 1920s—noncitizens voted in 22 states and federal territories in local, state and even federal elections, and also held public office such as alderman, coroner, and school board member. This paper presents arguments for (and against) noncitizen voting rights, and examines contemporary political organizations and actors who fought for and won (or lost) campaigns to reinstate noncitizen voting. The paper explores the politics of recent campaigns that successfully reestablished noncitizen voting, that are currently underway, and other campaigns that failed. The paper argues that an expansion of immigrant voting rights could boost possibilities for working‐class electoral coalitions and progressive politics.     

Rent-seeking and political tenure: First estimates

The paper shows that the “Frey–Schneider–Schultz hypothesis” – that there is a negative relation between the government's popularity and the government's incentives to engineer political business cycles – is consistent with rational, forward-looking voting provided one makes appropriate assumptions about the incumbent's preferences. The empirical part of the paper presents evidence favourable to the hypothesis using quarterly data on US money growth.     

Voting as an act of contribution

This paper presents a theory which rationalizes voting in terms of the marginal utility a citizen derives from contributing a small amount of effort in the political process when the cost of voting is small. Citizens abstain when the marginal cost of voting exceeds the marginal perceived benefit. A simple choice rule for voting in a two candidate race is derived from the theory. This rule depends on the voter's subjective belief about the election outcome as well as his preferences for the candidates. The key assumption is that the voter's utility increases if he votes for a winner, or decreases if he votes for a loser. This assumption is no less plausible than the assumption that voters believe they can be pivotal.     

Frequency of paradox in a common n-winner voting scheme

This paper investigates the extent to which a commonly used electoral scheme — voting for n candidates when there are n vacancies to fill — is likely to lead, in practice, to paradoxical results. Two types of paradox are investigated. One occurs when an increase in the number of vacancies causes a candidate to drop from the list of winners. The second occurs when the Condorcet candidate fails to win. Using a Monte Carlo study, we show that the likelihood of paradox can be substantial and depends critically on the degree of homogeneity of voters' preferences and on the number of voters.     

Does online voting change the outcome? Evidence from a multi-mode public policy referendum

Do online and offline voters differ in terms of policy preferences? The growth of Internet voting in recent years has opened up new channels of participation. Whether or not political outcomes change as a consequence of new modes of voting is an open question. Here we analyze all the votes cast both offline (n = 5.7 million) and online (n = 1.3 million) and compare the actual vote choices in a public policy referendum, the world's largest participatory budgeting process, in Rio Grande do Sul in June 2014. In addition to examining aggregate outcomes, we also conducted two surveys to better understand the demographic profiles of who chooses to vote online and offline. We find that policy preferences of online and offline voters are no different, even though our data suggest important demographic differences between offline and online voters.     

Modeling spending preferences & public policy

Understanding preferences over government spending is important for understanding electoral behavior and many other aspects of the political world. Using data on relative preferences for more or less spending across different issue areas, we estimate the general spending preferences of individuals and congressional candidates along a left-right spending dimension. Our modeling approach also allows us to estimate the location of policies on this same dimension, permitting direct comparison of people's spending preferences with where they perceive policy to be. We find that public shows very low levels of polarization on spending preferences, even across characteristics like partisanship, ideology, or income level. The distribution of candidates' spending preferences shows much more sorting by party, but candidates are significantly less polarized than is contemporary voting in Congress.     

The Anti‐Democrat Diploma: How High School Education Decreases Support for the Democratic Party

Attending high school can alter students' life trajectories by affecting labor market prospects and through exposure to ideas and networks. However, schooling's influence competes with early socialization forces and may be confounded by selection biases. Consequently, little is known about whether or how high school education shapes downstream political preferences and voting behavior. Using a generalized difference‐in‐differences design leveraging variation in U.S. state dropout laws across cohorts, I find that raising the school dropout age decreases Democratic partisan identification and voting later in life. Instrumental variables estimates suggest that an additional completed grade of high school decreases Democratic support by around 15 percentage points among students induced to remain in school by higher dropout ages. High school's effects principally operate by increasing income and support for conservative economic policies, especially at an individual's midlife earnings peak. In contrast, such schooling does not affect conservative attitudes on noneconomic issues or political engagement.     

Reining in the Bureaucrats: Democratic Transition and Administrative Procedural Reform in Korea

How do civilian presidents control their bureaucracies after taking over from an authoritarian regime? To answer this question, I develop a “reining in” theory of delegation. I argue that presidents who faces intrabranch conflict over policy issues and cannot appoint—and dismiss—freely will solve their delegation problems through administrative procedure acts (APAs) and related laws. While some scholars argue that APAs are tools for preserving the status quo, I find that APAs help presidents change policy. Building on the delegation literature from economics, my theory represents a more general argument than prior theories for why presidents support APAs. I test the theory through a case study of South Korea's first civilian government (post‐1961), under President Kim Young Sam. Kim initiated an APA to rein in a professionalized civil service that opposed his policy preferences. Strict procedural requirements designed to keep tabs on bureaucratic activities enhanced Kim's control over his bureaucracy.     

Local campaign activity and voting

Two types of data are used to address separate but related questions about the 2011 referendum on the parliamentary voting system. First, a survey of individual candidates at the coincident local government elections examines the extent to which local campaigning was used by the parties (as surrogates for the 'Yes' and 'No' camps) to provide information and decision cues to electors. Second, aggregate data at local authority-level compares participation in and voting preferences at the two electoral events. The combination of evidence suggests that while having coincident local elections helped to boost turnout in the referendum, the impact of local-level campaigning on the referendum outcome was marginal at best.