Agenda trees and sincere voting: a response to Schwartz

Schwartz (Public Choice 136:353–377, 2008) has identified a controversy within the voting theory literature pertaining to the representation of agenda structures and the consequent definition of sincere voting. This note responds to Schwartz’s remarks by arguing that the kind of agenda tree he uses does not adequately represent some common parliamentary agendas, and that consequently his definition of sincere voting cannot always be applied.     

Manipulability of voting by sincere truncation of preferences

A weak form of strategic voting, called ‘sincere truncation,’ occurs when a voter with a strict preference ranking does not rank all his or her choices on the ballot. A voting procedure is said to be manipulable by sincere truncation if one or more voters can obtain a preferred outcome through sincere truncation. Voting procedures that are not manipulable by sincere truncation are shown to be incompatible with the election of Condorcet (majority) candidates when they exist. A relaxation of simple majority rule, called the ‘7/12 rule,’ is also shown to conflict with nonmanipulability when additional conditions are imposed. These results are formally independent of the strategy-proofness theorems for voting and decision schemes established by Gibbard, Satterthwaite, and others. While their analyses are more inclusive in terms of the varieties of decision procedures allowed, they are also less demanding in their requirements for manipulability since voters are permitted to reverse sincere pReferences in their voting. Thus, plurality voting is manipulable in the sense of Gibbard-Satterthwaite (by preference reversals), but it is clearly nonmanipulable by sincere truncation.     

Sophisticated Behavior under Majoritarian and Non-Majoritarian Voting Procedures

This study addresses the issue of sincere and sophisticated voting under majoritarian and non-majoritarian voting procedures. By conducting experimental voting games, we compared a common majoritarian procedure, Plurality Voting (PV) with a non-majoritarian procedure, Sequential Voting by Veto (SVV). We focused on two different aspects of the subject: the likelihood of sophisticated voting under each one of the voting procedures and the conditions that foster sincere and sophisticated voting under these procedures. The results highlighted the significant differences between majoritarian and non-majoritarian voting procedures as a key factor in determining the tendency of voters to use sincere or sophisticated voting. Clearly, the sincere model was dominant in SVV games while sophisticated voting dominated the PV games. The extent of sophisticated voting ran counter to the group size, a tendency that was stronger under SVV than under PV. By demonstrating the advantages of the minority principle, when voters are small in number, we hope to encourage the development of a solution that will enable the use of SVV in general elections.     

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.     

Endogenous choice of amendment agendas: types of voters and experimental evidence

A stylized model of three parties choosing an amendment agenda and voting over three policy alternatives is analyzed. The analysis yields a classification of five types of voters: random, sincere, strategic, risk-averse, and EUS (expected utility sophisticated) proposed by Enelow (J. Polit. 43:1062–1089, 1981). Laboratory experiments suggest that the choice of agendas can be partially explained by the sincere voting model (26% of voters) and strategic voting model (47% of voters), even when players’ preferences are common knowledge. Risk-aversion may explain choices of up to 56% of the voters. Finally, the EUS voting model explains up to 73% of the observed voting behavior.     

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.

     

Approval voting,Condorcet's principle,and runoff elections

Approval voting allows each voter to vote for as many candidates as he wishes in an election but not cast more than one vote for each candidate of whom he approves. If there is a strict Condorcet candidate — a candidate who defeats all others in pairwise contests — approval voting is shown to be the only nonranked voting system that is always able to elect the strict Condorcet candidate when voters use sincere admissible strategies. Moreover, if a strict Condorcet candidate must be elected under ordinary plurality voting when voters use admissible strategies, then he must also be elected under approval voting when voters use admissible strategies, but the converse does not hold. The widely used plurality runoff method can also elect a strict Condorcet candidate when voters use admissible strategies on the first ballot, but some of these may have to be insincere to get the strict Condorcet candidate onto the runoff ballot. Furthermore, there is no case in which the strict Condorcet candidate is invariably elected under the plurality runoff method when voters use admissible first-ballot strategies. Thus, approval voting is superior to the plurality runoff method with respect to the Condorcet principle in its ability to elect the strict Condorcet candidate by sincere voting and in its ability to guarantee the election of the strict Condorcet candidate when voters use admissible strategies. In addition, approval voting is more efficient since it requires only one election and is probably less subject to strategic manipulation.     

The Borda rule is also intended for dishonest men

This paper examines the welfare consequences of strategic voting under the Borda rule in a comparison of utilitarian efficiencies in simulated voting games under two behavioural assumptions: expected utility-maximising behaviour and sincere behaviour. Utilitarian efficiency is higher in the former than in the latter. Strategic voting increases utilitarian efficiency particularly if the distribution of preference intensities correlates with voter types. The Borda rule is shown to have two advantages: strategic voting is beneficial even if some but not all voter types engage in strategic behaviour, and even if the voters’ information is based on unreliable signals.     

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.     

Sincere and strategic voters: An Israeli study

The theoretical literature on voting behavior has shown that a rational voter may sometimes decide to vote for a candidate or party that does not constitute his or her first preference. Such voters are traditionally called strategic voters, in contrast to voters who act sincerely, i.e., those who always vote for their first preference regardless of how others are likely to vote. After discussing some of the problems associated with the definition of these two types of voters and suggesting a new operational definition, some attitudes and characteristics of these two types of voters are investigated. It was found that strategic voters constitute a very small percentage of the entire electorate, that their education level is significantly higher than that of sincere voters, that they tend more often to believe that polls influence voters' decisions and hence tend to delay their own final voting decision, that they tend more often than sincere voters to support small parties but do not tend more often than sincere voters to switch the party they decide to support from one election to the next, and that there is no significant difference between them and sincere voters regarding which governing coalition should/will form following an election.     

(De)Centralization and voter turnout: theory and evidence from German municipalities

A vast academic literature illustrates that voter turnout is affected by the institutional design of elections (e.g., compulsory voting, electoral system, postal or Sunday voting). In this article, we exploit a simple Downsian theoretical framework to argue that the institutional framework of public good provision—and, in particular, the distribution of political and administrative competences across government levels—likewise affects voters’ turnout decisions by influencing the expected net benefit of voting. Empirically, we exploit the institutional variation across German municipalities to test this proposition, and find supportive evidence.     

Centripetal forces in spatial voting: On the size of the Yolk

The yolk, the smallest circle which intersects all median lines, has been shown to be an important tool in understanding the nature of majority voting in a spatial voting context. The center of the yolk is a natural ‘center’ of the set of voter ideal points. The radius of the yolk can be used to provide bounds on the size of the feasible set of outcomes of sophisticated voting under standard amendment procedure, and on the limits of agenda manipulation and cycling when voting is sincere. We show that under many plausible conditions the yolk can be expected to be small. Thus, majority rule processes in spatial voting games will be far better behaved than has commonly been supposed, and the possible outcomes of agenda manipulations will be generally constrained. This result was first conjectured by Tullock (1967).     

Voting Islamist or voting secular? An empirical analysis of voting outcomes in Egypt’s “Arab Spring”

This paper studies empirically the voting outcomes of Egypt’s first parliamentary elections after the Arab Spring. In light of the strong Islamist success at the polls, we explore the main determinants of Islamist versus secular voting. We identify two dimensions that affect voting outcomes at the constituency level: socioeconomic profile and the electoral institutional framework. Our results show that education is negatively associated with Islamist voting. Interestingly, we find significant evidence suggesting that higher poverty levels are associated with a lower vote share for Islamist parties. Exploiting the sequential voting setup, we show that later voting stages have not resulted in stronger support for the already winning Islamist parties (i.e., there is no bandwagon effect).     

Political theory in historical context. Reflections on Democratic Justice and the Social Contract by Albert Weale

In Democratic Justice and the Social Contract, Weale defends a contractarian theory of social justice following what he calls the ‘empirical method’, which consists in grounding ethics and politics on the observation of concrete examples of social contracts, rather than abstract speculations. In this paper, I will make three critical remarks. First, the empirical method is open to the same objections usually raised against more abstract approaches to social contract theory: by an appropriate choice of the starting point, one can justify any ethical or political position. Second, Weale’s focus on the societies that were successful in managing common pool resources appears arbitrary: other social organizations (e.g. hunters and gatherers societies) would be a more obvious choice. Finally, in following the empirical method, philosophers must be willing to import into ethics and politics the same problems of interpretation one encounters in theoretical social sciences. As an example, I will show that Weale’s position on the welfare state depends on the interpretation he gives of some practices observed in the societies he chooses as models. Different interpretations of the same practices would induce Weale to revise his positions.     

All voting is strategic

All voting is strategic because the shared outcomes are note within the choice set of any voter, the elements of which can only be strategies. Voting behavior need not re- flect the individual's ordering of outcomes, and the conventional distinction between sincere and sophisticated voting is misguided. In voting choice, the ordinal ranking of outcomes must be supplemented by intrapersonal evaluation of utility differences among these outcomes and also by predictions concerning the behavior of other participants in the nexus of interdependence.     

The Effect of Voting Technology on Voter Turnout: Do Computers Scare the Elderly?

In the aftermath of the Florida debacle in the 2000 Presidential election, there has been an emphasis on replacing voting equipment perceived as inferior (e.g., punch card ballots) with more technologically advanced voting methods. It is possible, however, that not all voters will be comfortable with high-tech voting devices. Elderly voters, for example, might be familiar with the old voting machines but apprehensive about computerized voting. If this is the case, the fear of new voting technology might cause the turnout of elderly voters to decrease. We test for this effect by analyzing the change in voter turnout across Georgia counties in the two most recent gubernatorial elections, as it relates to the share of the counties’ populations that is over the age of 65 years. Consistent with the hypothesis that computers scare the elderly, we find a significantly negative relationship between the change in voter turnout and the elderly share of the population. An additional 1% of the population that is elderly is associated with a 0.3–0.4% decrease in turnout. The hypothesis that elderly voters were apprehensive about the change in voting technology is also supported by the increase in absentee balloting.     

Die soziale Norm der Wahlbeteiligung

This article assesses the determinants of the subjective voting norm with the European Social Survey 2002/3 for 21 European democracies. The empirical procedure tests various combinations of four theoretical perspectives: (1) social integration, i.e., the extent and quality to which an individual is integrated into given social contexts, (2) social trust, i.e., the general willingness to cooperate with other individuals, (3) the support of the social system to which the norm belongs, and (4) the perception of the degree of compliance and the quality of a social norm in an individual’s context. The best explanation is offered by the model which combines social integration, the support of the social system and the perception of the degree of compliance and quality of the norm. We also examine additional causal paths of indicators of social integration through system support on the individual voting norm. The paper contributes to an improvement on existing literature through its more complex causal modelling and the placing of individual attitudes in context.     

Beyond Membership: A Sense of Community and Political Behavior

Why does community matter for political participation? In this paper, I consider how community psychology, particularly “sense of community” can be used to address questions of political behavior. Individuals’ perceptions about their significance in a given community can have meaningful effects on the way in which communities influence politics. Using a unique survey instrument designed to capture individual’s perceptions of community connectedness and political behavior across five contexts (workplace, church, associations, neighborhood, and circle of friends (i.e., an informal network) I analyze data from 822 respondents and examine how sense of community influences two types of political behavior: voting in local elections and political discussion. The empirical analyses presented demonstrate that sense of community contributes to explaining voting and discussion, even after controlling for demographic, personality, and other political factors.     

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.     

Liberalism, Democracy and the Ethics of Voting

This article summarises objections to compulsory voting developed in my previous work. It shows that compulsory turnout is harder to justify than compulsory voting and that considerations of democratic legitimacy do not usually justify it either. When abstention is morally wrong, it is unlikely to be because it is unfair to those who voted. So concerns for fairness will not justify compulsory voting. The article shows that democracy is a competitive as well as a co-operative business, and this means that political ethics are more complex than proponents of compulsory voting suppose.