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.     

Reply to Miller on agendas and sincerity

Contrary to Miller, Farquharson’s agenda trees do omit real parliamentary information. And the assumptions he uses to justify Farquharson’s definition of sincere (or naive) voting justify too little (e.g., he drops maximax) and rule out too much (e.g., non-pre-set agendas and principled sincere voting).     

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.     

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).     

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.     

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.     

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.

     

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.     

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.     

Voting for Pareto optimality: a multidimensional analysis

We compare unanimity rule and majority rule in their abilities to produce Pareto superior and Pareto optimal alternatives in fixed number of rounds of voting using a two-dimensional spatial voting model with random proposals, sincere proposals, and strategic proposals. Our findings show that for random or sincere proposals, majority rule is at least as likely to select a Pareto optimal outcome as unanimity rule. For strategic proposals, the subgame perfect equilibrium under unanimity rule is Pareto optimal. For other k-majority rules, the outcome is Pareto optimal or very close to it. For outcomes that are both Pareto optimal and Pareto superior, unanimity rule outperforms majority rule.     

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.     

From ideology to performance: Austerity and government defection in the 2014 European Parliament elections

The notion that domestic responses to financial crises are constrained in a way that limits the options available to national governments is not new. However, the last term of the European Parliament was a period when this reality was brought home to European electorates with previously unseen potency. This study explores the implications of this for the logic of voting in the 2014 European elections. Defection from government parties in EP elections is known to result from a combination of sincere/ideological and performance/protest voting logics. However, this study argues that fiscal tightening policies functioned, in the most affected countries, as a signal leading voters to discount the ideological positions of parties and to behave mostly under a pure protest logic.     

Political Attention and Public Policy: A Study of How Agenda Setting Matters

Political science research on agenda setting has been focused on how and why political agendas change over time. This article addresses the different but equally important question about how agenda setting actually matters to the policy outputs of national policy making. Do changes in the political agenda foreshadow changes in public policies? And does the effect of changes in the political agenda depend upon the policy preferences expressed by the mass public? Integrating research on policy agendas with well‐established ideas about re‐election‐oriented representation, this article offers a new approach to the study of such agenda effects. Furthermore, it demonstrates the empirical validity of this approach using a Danish dataset of public opinion, public policy and the national political agenda spanning a quarter of a century and covering several different issues.     

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.     

Why so much stability? An optimistic view of the possibility of rational legislative decisionmaking

Recent formal models of legislatures have proved that equilibrium outcomes are extremely unlikely without either (1) extreme restrictions upon preferences or (2) constraints upon the agenda. The implication is that constant instability or dictatorial manipulation is the norm in politics. This paper argues to the contrary, that legislatures (and other political processes) are characterized by some regularities, and that equilibrium models are the appropriate technique to use in describing these regularities. Examples from economic theory are used to illustrate this principle. The assumption of equilibrium is methodological, committing the researcher to develop models that have specific empirical implications. Using analogies from the economic theories of general equilibrium, oligopoly, and demand revealing processes, some potentially fruitful means of developing equilibrium political models are described. Assuming that legislators may freely make binding contracts has both empirical and normative advantages. Finally, institutional restrictions on legislative agendas may assure equilibrium. These include ‘constitutional’ rules, agreements to share ‘pork barrel’ projects evenly, limitation of committees to specific policy arenas, and the election of leaders who then determine the voting agenda.     

Strategic Voting in Scandinavian Parliaments

Increasingly a case is being made that voting systems are highly manipulable —whether by strategic voting, agenda setting, or vote trading. Yet there exists little hard evidence on the actual extent of manipulation in real world settings¹ To a large degree this lack of evidence is a result of voting methods that allow only partial recovery of individual preferences over multiple alternatives and of a natural desire of legislators not to publicize misrepresentation of preferences or strategic agenda setting. Yet if we are to understand the empirical relevance of recent advances in the theory of voting, attempts must be made to apply new theoretical work to real world voting situations. In this paper we attempt to do this for voting in Scandinavian legislatures.
Our major concern is with effects of the order of voting on legislative proposals and with strategic voting that takes advantage of existing voting orders. Two distinct approaches are used. First, we present a detailed analysis of three situations in the Swedish parliament in which strategic voting was relevant. From these we conclude that when manipulation occurs in the Swedish context, it is not by altering the order of voting or by the creation of new, confounding alternatives, but by using strategic voting to take advantage of existing voting circumstances. Second, we take a more sweeping but less detailed look at voting in the Scandinavian legislatures. It appears from this analysis that the major way in which strategic voting is avoided is by limiting the number of alternatives to two.     

On the mismeasurement of sincere and strategic voting in mixed-member electoral systems

Under mixed systems, voters cast two votes to elect the same legislative body: one vote for parties using proportional rules and one for candidates using majoritarian rules. Voters are said to cast straight-tickets if the candidate they vote for is of the same party as their proportional vote; otherwise, they are said to cast split-tickets. Split-ticket voting is commonly used as a measure of strategic voting as splitters are usually assumed to express their true preference in one vote but vote strategically in the other. This study challenges this practice showing that split-ticket voting does not necessarily indicate strategic voting, just as straight-ticket voting does not necessarily indicate a sincere vote. This result has wider consequences as it indicates that measuring strategic voting from observed behaviour can result in incorrect conclusions about vote choice.     

Television and party political dissent: intra‐party competition and the formation of news agendas

This paper re‐examines the formation of political news agendas on British television. It argues that studies of news agenda formation in political communication have been overly focused on general election campaigns and the competition between the main political parties to set the news agenda. It suggests that such studies see political parties as either homogeneous or focus exclusively on the activities of communication elites and therefore miss another important aspect of the modern political communication process. Using the British party conferences as a case study, this paper argues that in order to capture the complexities of agenda formation outside election periods, political parties have to be seen as heterogeneous organisations, consisting of various ‘claim‐makers’. News agendas in certain situations have to be understood as the product of intra‐party competition between the leadership and dissenting voices. While this competition is imperfect, favouring resource rich party elites, on certain newsworthy issues broadcasting professionals act as a counterweight to leadership resource advantages, and help shape the outcome of intra‐party competition. In conclusion the paper suggests that dissenting actors within political parties, when newsworthy, can make a substantial contribution to the formation of television news agendas despite the resistance of party leaderships. Taking account of the communicative activity of these actors and of news values will provide further insights into the formation of political news agendas between general elections. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

The Separation of Powers and Supreme Court Agenda Setting

This study employs the first systematic, empirical analysis that relies on archival data to examine whether the separation of powers influences justices' agenda votes. It spatially models how justices set the Court's agenda under a sincere approach as well as an SOP approach and compares the competing expectations derived therefrom. The results suggest that legislative and executive preferences fail to influence justices' votes. Across every model tested, the data show justices uninfluenced by the separation of powers. These results provide a strong rejoinder to SOP models, since the Court's agenda stage is the most likely stage of the decision‐making process to show signs of an SOP effect.     

Equilibrium in multicandidate probabilistic spatial voting

This paper presents a multicandidate spatial model of probabilistic voting in which voter utility functions contain a random element specific to each candidate. The model assumes no abstentions, sincere voting, and the maximization of expected vote by each candidate. We derive a sufficient condition for concavity of the candidate expected vote function with which the existence of equilibrium is related to the degree of voter uncertainty. We show that, under concavity, convergent equilibrium exists at a “minimum-sum point” at which total distances from all voter ideal points are minimized. We then discuss the location of convergent equilibrium for various measures of distance. In our examples, computer analysis indicates that non-convergent equilibria are only locally stable and disappear as voter uncertainty increases.