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 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.     

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.     

Some properties of Hare voting with strategic voters

From the perspective of some common criteria for evaluating voting procedures, the results we offer in this essay will almost certainly be interpreted as inditments of STV. Even if we restrict preferences with conditions R1 and R2, STV is not necessarily incentive compatible. Moreover, strategic voting does not ensure the selection of Condorcet winning candidates or of Condorcet outcomes. This fact, moreover is not dependent on the existence of bogus equilibria — outcomes that exclude Condorcet candidates cannot be avoided under all circumstances even if we limit our analysis to strong or to individually stable equilibria.It is not the case, though, that the Condorcet criterion is the unique or even the most important criterion with which to evaluate election procedures. For example, we have not examined the extent to which STV ensures proportionality and we have not compared STV to other procedures. Despite the apparent deficiencies described in this essay, STV may yet prove to be a viable alternative to systems that seek to ensure proportionality by other means.     

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,...     

Collective decision-making of voters with heterogeneous levels of rationality

This paper studies the collective decision-making processes of voters who have heterogeneous levels of rationality. Specifically, we consider a voting body consisting of both rational and sincere voters. Rational voters vote strategically, correctly using both their private information and the information implicit in other voters’ actions to make decisions; sincere voters vote according to their private information alone. We first characterize the conditions under which the presence of sincere voters increases, reduces, or does not alter the probabilities of making correct collective decisions. We also discuss how the probabilities change when the incidence of sincere voters in the population varies. We then characterize the necessary and sufficient condition under which informational efficiency can be achieved when sincere voters coexist with rational voters. We find that when sincere voters are present, supermajority rules with high consensus levels are not as desirable as they are in rational voting models, as informational efficiency fails under such voting rules.

     

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.     

群体性事件的法治探索

群体性事件是我国社会新时期各种社会矛盾的综合反映,通过法律制度化的建设,完善社会利益诉求表达机制是预防社会群体性事件发生的根本.从法治视角研究群体性事件,界定群体性事件的概念、分类及特征,分析其成因.在法治的框架内高效及时地处置、防治群体性事件,是现代法治理念对一个法治国家的基本要求,也只有这样才能保持社会的健康发展和长治久安,才能探索出一条有效化解人民内部矛盾,推进社会健康、和谐发展的道路.     

Minimizing the threat of a positive majority deficit in two-tier voting systems with equipopulous units

The mean majority deficit in a two-tier voting system is a function of the partition of the population. We derive a new square-root rule: For odd-numbered population sizes and equipopulous units the mean majority deficit is maximal when the member size of the units in the partition is close to the square root of the population size. Furthermore, within the partitions into roughly equipopulous units, partitions with small even numbers of units or small even-sized units yield high mean majority deficits. We discuss the implications for the winner-takes-all system in the US Electoral College.     

Existence of a ‘structurally stable’ equilibrium for a non-collegial voting rule

This essay shows that, for any non-collegial voting rule, σ, there exists an integer, s(σ), with this property: if the policy space, W, has dimension no greater than s(σ), then there exists a profile of smooth utilities on W, such that the core for σ at this profile is non-empty and ‘structurally stable’ under sufficiently small perturbation. We also show how we may compute s(σ) for an arbitrary rule. This material is based upon work supported by NSF grant SES-84-18296, to the School of Social Sciences, University of California at Irvine. An early draft was written while the author was Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology. Thanks are due to Kenneth Shepsle, Dick McKelvey and Gary Cox for helpful comments, to Michael Chwe and Shaun Bowler for research assistance, and to Derek Hearl and Ian Budge for permission to make use of unpublished data.     

Constraints on the turnout gap between high and low knowledge (or income) voters: Combining the Duncan-Davis method of bounds with the Taagepera method of bounds

Countries differ quite substantially in mean turnout levels, and it is equally well known that there may be substantial within-country variation as well, for example, between high income and low-income groupings or between high political knowledge and low political knowledge groupings. It has been hypothesized that the size of such between-group gaps will fall as turnout rises, and conversely (Franklin, 2004. Blais, 2000). However, as Franklin (2004) also noted, there are mathematical constraints on the size of the turnout gap that are related to the level of turnout. For example, in the limit, if turnout is 100%, then all groups must have identical turnout. Here we build on this insight by adapting the classic work on boundary conditions done by two sociologists (Duncan and Davis, 1953) to show precisely what the boundary constraints look like over the entire range of turnout values. Then we show how these constraints can help make sense of the strong relationship found between overall turnout and the size of the gap between voters above and below the median in political knowledge in the Fisher et al. (2008) cross-national study. To do so we draw on ideas in Rein (Taagepera, 2007) and (Taagepera, 2008) about how to use boundary condition information to develop better theoretical models.