The Alternative Vote and Coombs Rule versus First-Past-the-Post: a social choice analysis of simulated data based on English elections, 1992–2010

This paper presents a social choice analysis, using simulated data based on English general elections from 1992 through 2010, of the properties of three voting rules: First-Past-the-Post, the Alternative Vote, and the Coombs Rule. More specifically, the paper examines (1) the plurality, anti-plurality, and Condorcet status of candidates in each election and the interrelationships among these statuses, (2) the effects of strict and partial single-peakedness of voter preferences, and (3) the identity of winners, Condorcet efficiency, and the relationship between votes and seats under the three voting rules. The analysis considers only the case of three candidates and, in the manner of basic social choice theory, the set of candidates and voter preferences over them are taken to be fixed.     

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.     

Are Voters Mobilized by a ‘Friend-and-Neighbor’ on the Ballot? Evidence from a Field Experiment

In his seminal work on Southern politics, V.O. Key observed that voters disproportionately support local candidates at the ballot box. While empirical analyses have confirmed “friends-and-neighbors” voting across numerous electoral contexts, no one has directly examined voter turnout as the mechanism linking place of residence to vote choice. We argue that place of residence is a social identity that incentivizes citizens to turn out to vote on behalf of the local candidate. We test this mobilization mechanism using a randomized field experiment conducted during a 2014 state legislative primary election. Our results show that county ties between candidates and voters likely boost turnout. Our findings contribute to our understanding of the importance of place identity for turnout decisions in low-information elections.     

Do White In-group Processes Matter,Too? White Racial Identity and Support for Black Political Candidates

Scholars find that negative evaluations of Blacks lead Whites to vote against Black political candidates. However, can an in-group psychological process have the same effect? We consider White racial identity to be a strong candidate for such a process. We argue that the mere presence of a Black candidate cues the identity, reducing support for these candidates among Whites. We test this hypothesis on vote choice in seven instances. Five of them involve simple vote choice models: the 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections, and three elections in 2010: The Massachusetts Gubernatorial election, Black candidates for the US House, and Black candidates for the US Senate. The other two are tests of the notion that White racial identity reduced President Obama’s approval, thus reducing support for all Democratic Congressional candidates in the 2010 Midterm and 2012 Congressional elections. We find support for these notions in all seven cases, across these seven elections, using four different survey research datasets, and four different measures of White identity. Comparisons with other presidential elections show that White identity did not significantly affect mono-racial elections. Furthermore, we find the White identity and racial resentment results to be very similar in terms of their robustness and apparent effect sizes. This indicates in-group evaluations, and those that focus on out-groups, operate independently of one another.     

Proximity voting in the 2010 U.S. House elections

Utilizing data that allows for the placement of both of the candidates running and voters on the same ideological scale, I model proximity voting in the 2010 House elections. I demonstrate that though the literature predominantly emphasizes partisanship and incumbency, relative distance from the candidates also plays a significant role in the voting decision. Additionally, I show that these proximity effects are conditional upon the type of candidate running and the individual's partisan attachment. In total, these results show that while the rates of partisan voting and incumbent victory are high in House elections, voters do consider ideological proximity and can punish candidates who take positions that are too far out of line.     

Anticandidate voting in the 1984 presidential election

Data from a national survey conducted in 1984 form the basis for a new analysis of anticandidate voting in presidential elections, i.e., voting focused more on a candidate one opposes than on a candidate one prefers. Anticandidate voting is viewed as the end product of a process whereby voters attempt to reduce discomfort that cross-pressures generate within their decision frameworks. In 1984, nearly a third of all likely voters said they were primarily motivated by a desire to voteagainst one of the two presidential candidates, a rate of anticandidate voting similar to that observed in the Johnson-Goldwater election of 1964 but well below that of the 1980 Reagan-Carter election. However, factors related to anticandidate voting in the past were not consistently linked to anticandidate voting in 1984. We conclude that the presence of Ronald Reagan exerted such a strong influence on the 1984 campaign that processes that would normally be observable, such as anticandidate voting, were overridden.     

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.     

Who's favored by evaluative voting? An experiment conducted during the 2012 French presidential election

Under evaluative voting, the voter freely grades each candidate on a numerical scale, with the winning candidate being determined by the sum of the grades they receive. This paper compares evaluative voting with the two-round system, reporting on an experiment, conducted during the 2012 French presidential election, which attracted 2340 participants. Here we show that the two-round system favors “exclusive” candidates, that is candidates who elicit strong feelings, while evaluative rules favor “inclusive” candidates, that is candidates who attract the support of a large span of the electorate. These differences are explained by two complementary reasons: the opportunity for the voter to support several candidates under evaluative voting rules, and the specific pattern of strategic voting under the two-round voting rule.     

Making wasted votes count: Turnout,transfers, and preferential voting in practice

Proponents of electoral reform champion the single transferable vote (STV) or aligned forms of preferential voting (AV, IRV, RCV) as a method to improve participation among and representation of the general public. Voters provide an ordinal ranking among alternatives on the ballot, and ballots not used to elect a candidate are transferred to another favored alternative. Preferential voting is intended to encourage both citizen participation in an election and sincere voting. Yet the empirical evidence about the effects of preferential voting in the scholarly literature is scant. Elections of members to the Dáil Éireann, the lower house of national parliament in Ireland, provide a wealth of data on preferential voting. Data from four recent Irish elections (1997, 2002, 2007, and 2011) are analyzed to assess the effectiveness of STV on reducing wasted votes. The number of nontransferable ballots, votes not used for any candidate, is large and increases as the need for lower level preferences (that is, later counts or rounds) grows. Voter turnout does not correspond to preferential voting in predictable ways; turnout declines as the number of candidates elected increases. Although preferential voting systems have much to offer, their effects need to be evaluated.     

It’s the economy, and then some: modeling the presidential vote with state panel data

Using data for the 50 US states for presidential elections from 1972 to 2004 two theories for determining state voting outcomes are considered jointly: the ‘economy matters’ and ‘home grown-ness’ theories. Fixed-effects regressions show that measures of the ‘economy matters’ (real income, unemployment and a proxy for inflation) have the predicted effects on state voting patterns for presidential elections. The home grown theory receives mixed support. There is weak evidence that incumbent-party candidates garner greater support in their home states. There is strong support, however, for the proposition that incumbent-party candidates fare worse in the home state of rival-party candidates.     

Candidates' Ideological Locations,Abstention, and Turnout in U.S. Midterm Senate Elections

Many spatial models of voting suggest that citizens are more likely to abstain when they feel indifferent toward the candidates or alienated from them. In presidential elections, previous research offers evidence that alienation and indifference affect individuals' probabilities of voting. We find evidence that indifference and alienation also affect the decision to vote in midterm Senate elections, a context not previously explored. These individual-level effects imply that candidates' ideological locations should influence aggregate turnout by affecting the proportions of citizens who feel indifferent toward or alienated from the candidates. Our aggregate-level analysis supports this (at least in contests featuring two previous and/or future members of Congress). Our findings underscore the importance of the electoral context for understanding citizen behavior and suggest that elections featuring at least one centrist candidate may be normatively appealing since they stimulate participation.     

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.

     

An assessment of voting systems under the proximity and directional models of the vote

I evaluate five single-winner voting systems according to their tendency to elect Condorcet candidates under alternative models of issue voting derived from behavioral research. These behavioral models posit that voters have both issue and nonissue motivations; within this framework, I study the effects of both the directional and proximity voting models, with varying degrees of issue voting. Under the proximity metric, all voting systems are most efficient when voters attach little importance to issues, while the opposite is generally the case under directional voting. In contrast to previous results, voting systems tend to be more efficient for large than for small electorates. All voting systems – including the widely-criticized plurality method – are extremely efficient when voters in mass elections are inattentive to issues.     

Does the Ideological Proximity Between Candidates and Voters Affect Voting in U.S. House Elections?

Do citizens hold congressional candidates accountable for their policy positions? Recent studies reach different conclusions on this important question. In line with the predictions of spatial voting theory, a number of recent survey-based studies have found reassuring evidence that voters choose the candidate with the most spatially proximate policy positions. In contrast, most electoral studies find that candidates’ ideological moderation has only a small association with vote margins, especially in the modern, polarized Congress. We bring clarity to these discordant findings using the largest dataset to date of voting behavior in congressional elections. We find that the ideological positions of congressional candidates have only a small association with citizens’ voting behavior. Instead, citizens cast their votes “as if” based on proximity to parties rather than individual candidates. The modest degree of candidate-centered spatial voting in recent Congressional elections may help explain the polarization and lack of responsiveness in the contemporary Congress.     

Measuring majority power and veto power of voting rules

We study voting rules with respect to how they allow or limit a majority from dominating minorities: whether a voting rule makes a majority powerful and whether minorities can veto the candidates they do not prefer. For a given voting rule, the minimal share of voters that guarantees a victory to one of the majority’s most preferred candidates is the measure of majority power; and the minimal share of voters that allows the minority to veto each of their least preferred candidates is the measure of veto power. We find tight bounds on such minimal shares for voting rules that are popular in the literature and used in real elections. We order the rules according to majority power and veto power. Instant-runoff voting has both the highest majority power and the highest veto power; plurality rule has the lowest. In general, the greater is the majority power of a voting rule, the greater its veto power. The three exceptions are: voting with proportional veto power, Black’s rule and Borda’s rule, which have relatively weak majority power and strong veto power, thus providing minority protection. Our results can shed light on how voting rules provide different incentives for voter participation and candidate nomination.

     

Trading places

This paper examines effects that alternative voting systems can have on electoral outcomes in multicandidate elections. Using ballots collected from a county Republican Party special election, we recount the votes using preference-based voting systems and compare the results to the special election outcome. Relative rankings of candidates change across vote counting rules and voting systems. Because candidates trade places depending on rules, there are strong strategic implications for candidates and for those establishing the rules.     

The gender gap in same-gender voting: The role of context

If parties nominate both male and female candidates, open-list PR electoral rules enable voters to engage in same-gender voting (i.e. select candidate of the same gender). In this regard, there is a gender gap in Finland, an otherwise highly egalitarian country: over time, men tend to support mostly male candidates, while women are roughly equally divided between male and female candidates. This study investigates whether voters' likelihood of selecting a candidate of the same gender is affected by contextual factors. Based on pooled cross-sectional data from five Finnish parliamentary elections between 1979 and 2011, it shows that gender differences in same-gender voting are substantially reduced when district magnitude and gender ratios among candidates and elected deputies are taken into account.     

Information disclosure in elections with sequential costly participation

Public Choice - Using a pivotal costly voting model of elections in which voters privately have formed preferences over two candidates and act sequentially, I study how different rules for...     

Deducing preferences and choices in the 1980 presidential election

A rational-choice model of voting behavior provides a framework for statistically estimating the numbers of voters who had each of twelve possible strict and nonstrict preference orders for the three major candidates in the 1980 presidential election. These estimates, based upon explicit assumptions about voting behavior, lead to a number of deductions not obtained in previous studies that have defined rationality in terms of ‘issue voting’. Among other results, John Anderson is found to have both first-place and residual support far in excess of his popular-vote showing, from which it is inferred that he would have seriously challenged the major-party candidates under approval voting. Yet, there is not strong evidence that voter's preferences were single-peaked, with Anderson perceived as the candidate in the middle on a left-right ideological scale.     

Candidates’ policy strategies in primary elections: does strategic voting by the primary electorate matter?

Empirical research reports conflicting conclusions about whether primary election voters strategically account for candidates’ general election prospects when casting their votes. We model the strategic calculations of office-seeking candidates facing two-stage elections beginning with a primary, and we compare candidates’ policy strategies in situations where primary voters strategically support the most viable general election candidate against candidate strategies when voters expressively support their preferred primary candidate regardless of electability. Our analyses—in which the candidates’ appeal is based on their policy positions and their campaigning skills—suggest a surprising conclusion: namely, that strategic and expressive primary voting typically support identical equilibrium configurations in candidate strategies. Our conclusions are relevant to candidates facing contested primaries, and also to political parties facing the strategic decision about whether or not to use primary elections to select their candidates—a common dilemma for Latin American (and some European) parties.