President Perot or Fundamentals of Voting Theory Illustrated with the 1992 Election

Different voting systems can lead to different election outcomeseven when voter preferences are held constant. Using the 1992 election as anexample, it is shown how the outcome of every positional votesystem can be found. Similarly, every possible cumulative andapproval vote outcome is shown. Multiple vote systems, likeapproval and cumulative voting, have disturbing properties. Usingthe 1992 election as illustration, it is shown how a candidate whowins under every positional vote system, who wins every pairwisevote (i.e. is the Condorcet winner), and who has the most firstplace and least last place votes may nevertheless lose underapproval or cumulative voting. Similarly, it is shown how acandidate who loses under every positional system, who loses everypairwise vote (i.e. is the Condorcet loser), and who has the leastfirst place and most last place votes may nevertheless win underapproval or cumulative voting.     

Plurality versus proportional representation: An analysis of Sicilian elections

The competing merits of plurality and proportional representation have intrigued political economists and political scientists for quite some time. Of primary interest is whether one or the other system is better in serving the interests of the electorate. Since theoreticians are unable to unambiguously determine the answer to this question, the issue must ultimately be decided empirically. We use data from Sicilian elections, where the system was recently altered towards the system of plurality. We are able to demonstrate that the proportional representation system engenders greater information among voters and elicits greater commitment from them than plurality. We are also able to show that in larger towns increased information causes a more dispersed vote under a proportional representation system; further, this result does not hold under plurality. This may have some implications for the size of positional rents reaped by political parties under the two electoral systems.     

何种文化?谁之霸权?——从苏联与中国的政治实践看葛兰西的文化霸权理论

葛兰西文化霸权理论认为,在市民社会较为成熟的欧洲国家,无产阶级应该首先通过阵地战的方式在文化领域取得领导权,进而夺取国家政权。这就表明,现代国家的真正力量不在于统治阶级的暴力和国家机器的强制性,而在于被统治阶级对统治阶级世界观和价值体系的认同。葛兰西的理论观点对当代中国的文化和意识形态建设具有重要的借鉴意义。在当代中国,执政党确立意识形态领导权地位的方式就在于通过谈判与对话的方式,将各种具有异质目的的分散意志用务实的目标统一起来,由此形成具有共同情感和利益要求的历史的集团,开创文明的新时代。     

Susceptibility to manipulation

All positional voting procedures can be manipulated, so it is natural to question whether some of these systems are more susceptible to being manipulated than others. In this essay, this susceptibility factor is measured for strategic action involving small groups. It is shown that the system least susceptible to micro manipulations for n = 3 candidates is the Borda Count (BC). The optimal choice changes with n, but the analysis shows that the BC always fares fairly well. On the other hand, the plurality and anti-plurality vote as well as multiple voting systems, such as approval voting and cumulative voting, always fare quite poorly with respect to susceptibility. Finally, it is shown why it is possible to justify any voting method by choosing an appropriate measure of susceptibility and imposing the appropriate assumptions on the profiles of voters. This statement emphasizes the importance of the basic assumptions of neutrality used throughout this essay.     

Economic voting theory: Testing new dimensions

Classical economic voting theory has received considerable empirical support. Voters reward the incumbent for good times, punish it for bad. But the success of this paradigm, which views the economy as strictly a valence issue, has crowded out testing of other theoretical dimensions. In particular, positional and patrimonial economic voting have hardly been examined. The former concerns the different preferences voters have on economic policy issues, such as progressive taxation. The latter concerns the place of voters in the economic structure itself, not merely as members of a social class but as actual property owners. Through analysis of a special battery of economic items, from a 2008 US presidential election survey, we demonstrate that the economy was important to voters in three ways: valence, position, and patrimony. Taken together, these dimensions go far as an explanation of vote choice, at least with respect to the short-term forces acting on this political behavior.     

Alphabetic bias in partisan elections: Patterns of voting for the Spanish Senate, 1982 and 1986

Recent research has suggested that, in partisan elections, candidates derive no special advantage from being placed first or as high as possible on the ballot, and that, consequently, measures to neutralize this alphabetic or positional bias are unnecessary. We warn against these conclusions, and analyse one case of particularly clear alphabetic voting: the 1982 and 1986 Senate elections in Spain. The aggregate alphabetic advantage that candidates enjoyed over their party's next lower candidates on the ballot ranged from 1.7 to 3.7 per cent. And, in both elections, more than 10 per cent of the 188 senators elected in four-member districts can be shown to have been elected as a result of their alphabetic advantage.     

A dynamic Duverger’s law

Electoral systems promote strategic voting and affect party systems. Duverger (Les partis politiques, 1951) proposed that plurality rule leads to bi-partyism and proportional representation leads to multi-partyism. We show that in a dynamic setting, these static effects also lead to a higher option value for existing minor parties under plurality rule, so their incentive to exit the party system is mitigated by their future benefits from continued participation. The predictions of our model are consistent with multiple cross-sectional predictions on the comparative number of parties under plurality rule and proportional representation. In particular, there could be more parties under plurality rule than under proportional representation at any point in time. However, our model makes a unique time-series prediction: the number of parties under plurality rule should be less variable than under proportional representation. We provide extensive empirical evidence in support of these results.     

Appearing moderate or radical? Radical left party success and the two-dimensional political space

Abstract

Challenger parties’ electoral successes have attracted increasing scholarly attention. Based on the example of West European radical left parties, this article investigates whether and how centripetal and centrifugal positional movements on different conflict dimensions influence the election results of these parties. Depending on parties’ issue-linkages, these strategies will have a different effect for the economic and the non-economic issue dimension. Due to radical left parties’ long-term commitment and a strong party-issue linkage on economic issues, more moderate positions will play to their electoral advantage. In contrast, far-left parties compete with social democratic and green-libertarian parties for party-issue linkages on the non-economic issue dimension. Here, they benefit from promoting centrifugal strategies. Based on time-series cross-section analyses for 25 West European far-left parties between 1990 and 2017, the empirical results show that the success of radical left parties’ positional strategies varies with the conflict dimension in question and that this effect is only partly moderated by the positions of competing mainstream left parties.     

Issues management,systems, and rhetoric: exploring the distinction between ethical and legal guidelines at Enron

• Many corporations use legal rather than ethical standards for decision making in issues management. The Enron collapse provides a case example of why legal standards should never be used as a substitute for ethical principles. As we illustrate in this discussion of Enron, seeking loopholes in the law can lead to ethical violations that are ultimately more severe than legal infractions. We use systems theory and rhetorical rationales to discuss the issues management function as the proper location in an organization for ethical decision making and corporate responsibility. Both systems theory and rhetoric support the argument that an organization must be good internally and make decisions from an outside‐in perspective; management at Enron heeded neither idea. This research recommends a deontological approach, based on Kantian norms of moral autonomy and good intention as a basis for ethical issues management, and uses the Enron case for illustration of these principles. We conclude this discussion by offering a matrix simplifying the principles of both ethical and legal decision making based on systems theory and rhetorical approaches to public policy.

Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A linear inequality method of establishing certain social choice conjectures

This paper demonstrates the equivalence between sets of linear inequalities and a variety of social choice problems, a fact which permits the solution of the problems using linear programming techniques. An important advantage of this approach is that the primal solution of the linear programming problem, if one exists, provides a specific example illustrating the social choice conjecture under consideration. Examples illustrating this approach to several standard types of social choice problems are presented. Social choice theory relies heavily on demonstrations that various social choice functions can disagree with one another or that these functions are inconsistent with one or more fundamental conditions or axioms held to be desirable properties of a method of deriving a “fair and reasonable” social choice from a set of individual preference orderings. A large class of such conjectures can be shown to be equivalent to systems of linear inequalities. This equivalence makes it possible to establish the truth or falsehood of such social choice conjectures by testing the systems for consistency or by employing one of the many available algorithms to solve the corresponding linear programs. We will give below a number of examples of conjectures resolved in this fashion, but first we must show how the appropriate inequality systems and linear programs may be found.     

Valence Politics and Equilibrium in Spatial Election Models

Spatial models of two-party or two-candidatecompetition almost never have pure-strategy Nashequilibria when the issue space has more than onedimension. This paper shows that the introduction ofvalence issues can create conditions where equilibriaexist, even in a multidimensional setting. We derivesufficient conditions for the existence of equilibria,and characterize the spatial locations of twocompeting parties or candidates when such equilibriaexist. The party with the advantage on the valencedimension will generally take a moderate position onthe positional issues. We consider the implications ofthese results for public perceptions of the parties,incumbency advantages, and realigning elections.     

A Topography of Civil Service Laws

ABSTRACT

We offer a comparative study of the differences in civil service laws across countries in order to observe how these systems relate to one another. We compare the civil service laws of 26 countries from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and eight non-OECD countries from Central and Eastern Europe to identify how different configurations of civil service systems are revealed through their shared attributes. Our data are drawn from the contents of civil service legislation and the status of those civil servants covered by the civil service laws of these countries. We use cluster analysis to identify several groups of countries whose civil service systems share similar features. We find that the estimated topography, or similarity among systems, depends on both subjective decisions about the number of groups and the variables used to estimate the space. However, we draw key conclusions about the value of certain cases, like the United States, for learning about other systems, and the need for expanded knowledge of systems from Central and Eastern Europe.     

Class Parties and Class Voting in the Scandinavian Countries

This study is a comparative survey analysis of similarities and differences in the Scandinavian party systems. These are all dominated by three big class parties, Social Democrat, Agrarian, Conservative, each representing mainly one occupational group. The study investigates the electoral basis of each type of class party in order to explain class voting, and it finds a similar pattern of social factors which influence class voting. The article also considers the differences between the Scandinavian party systems, the psychological variables influencing class voting, a possible decline in class voting, and the distinctiveness of the Scandinavian party systems compared to other types of party systems.     

Axiomatizations of a positional power score and measure for hierarchies

The extant literature on positional power in hierarchies is mainly restricted to the analysis of power in terms of the authority structure. This is based upon the bare positions of actors and ignores the existence of decision-making mechanisms. The few studies, which also take into account decision-making mechanisms, are ‘membership-based’. In an earlier paper we demonstrated that such an approach is, in general, inappropriate. As a solution we suggested an ‘action-based’ approach and developed a power score and measure ascribing positional power to actors in hierarchies. In this paper we axiomatize this power score and measure and illustrate their applicability.     

Spatial models in voting advice applications

We examine the use of spatial models in Voting Advice Applications. A successful branch of VAAs uses multidimensional models of the political space to inform users of their policy match with political parties. Creators of these VAAs offer only a very generalized justification for the choice of their underlying spatial model. We examine whether these spatial representations offer a valid depiction of policy differences between parties. We compare the spatial models from the available national ‘electoral compasses’, which include established democracies as well as semi-authoritarian and transitional systems. We find that the two-dimensional ‘one-size fits all’ model that is used in all of these countries fails to accommodate significant variation between party systems.     

A Choice-Based Measure of Issue Importance in the Electorate

Measuring how much citizens care about different policy issues is critical for political scientists, yet existing measurement approaches have significant limitations. We provide a new survey-experimental, choice-based approach for measuring the importance voters attach to different positional issues, including issues not currently contested by political elites. We combine information from (a) direct questions eliciting respondents' positions on different issues with (b) a conjoint experiment asking respondents to trade off departures from their preferred positions on those issues. Applying this method to study the relative importance of 34 issues in the United Kingdom, we show that British voters attach significant importance to issues like the death penalty that are not presently the subject of political debate and attach more importance to those issues associated with social liberal–conservative rather than economic left–right divisions.     

Patrimonial Economic Voting: Legislative Elections in France

Patrimonial economic voting has been neglected in favour of classical economic voting studies. This assertion holds less, however, with French election investigations, where the neglect is relative rather than absolute. Whereas classical economic voting holds the economy to be a valence issue, patrimonial economic voting regards the economy as a positional issue. Voters who own more property, in particular high-risk assets, are held to be more right-wing in their political preferences. This patrimonial effect shows itself to be statistically and substantively strong in one of the few election data-sets with sufficient measures available – surveys on the National Assembly contests of 1978, 1988, 2002. The electoral effect exceeds that from the traditional ‘heavy variables’ of class and income. Moreover, further work might show its impact comparable to that of classic sociotropic retrospective evaluations of the national economy. Certainly a case can be made for further study of patrimonial economic voting, as compared to classical economic voting.     

Mixed electoral rules’ impact on party systems

The growing literature about mixed electoral systems has addressed their effect on party systems, voting behavior, campaign strategies, legislative roll-call voting, and other issues in a handful of countries. But, the effect of mixed systems has not been fully evaluated cross-nationally or longitudinally. Using data from the World Bank’s Database of Political Institutions, we address this gap in the literature by investigating two related questions. First, do mixed electoral rules produce different election outcomes than other election rules? Second, are these results attenuated by the definitions of mixed systems that scholars employ? We find that mixed systems generate outcomes that are distinct from other electoral systems and that these findings are generally robust across different definitions.     

Positional power and political influence in the Federal Republic of Germany

Abstract. Methods of elite identification measure different aspects of power in societies. The relationship between the positional and the decisional methods was studied empirically, using data from a 1981 West German elite survey. In this survey, respondents determined through the positional method were asked to name their interaction partners for (political) issues in which they were actively involved. The results show that incumbency of an elite position is a crucial precondition for becoming politically influential. Only a small number of legislators, journalists, and academics who did not hold an elite position were mentioned as key influentials. The same data were also used to determine the denser part of the West German elite network which was made up of 559 core decision-makers. The sector composition of this elite circle underlines the intermediating role of political leaders and senior civil servants.     

Extension of the portfolio allocation model to surplus majority governments: a fuzzy approach

Scholars have long studied the conditions under which the cabinet making process will result in minority, surplus majority, or minimum-winning governing coalitions in parliamentary systems. Since Riker, a good number of these attempts have been based on rational choice assumptions. Among formal approaches in this vein, Laver and Shepsle’s (Making and breaking governments: Cabinets and legislatures in parliamentary governments, 1996) portfolio allocation model argues that parties centrally located in policy space have a greater potential for being part of any governing coalition and that parties located at the issue-by-issue median have a high likelihood of forming a minority government. However, the model predicts that surplus majority coalitions will only form when the number of salient policy dimensions in the political system is greater than two. We incorporate fuzzy set theory in the portfolio allocation model, permitting us to model ambiguity in parties’ policy preferences. The reformulated model accounts for the formation of surplus majority coalitions in two-dimensional policy space. We illustrate the model’s conclusions with a case study of the 1996 surplus majority coalition in the Lithuanian Seimas.