Do legislators' votes reflect constituency preference? A simple way to evaluate the Senate

U.S. senators frequently vote against the preference of their constituency, assuming that such a preference exists. Both of a state's senators represent the same constituency. Whenever they split their votes, one or the other is necessarily going against the constituency preference. For the sample of defense-related votes analyzed above, misrepresentation — either observable vote splitting or unobservable vote matches that go against the constituency preference — occurred at least 37 percent of the time, at least 46 percent on one vote. Although party differences accounted for more than two-thirds of the vote splitting, a substantial number of splits remained. Besides, a party difference for a state's senatorial pair is itself problematical.The method employed here can be applied easily to any data whatever on senatorial voting. Its application will show that, quite often, many senators depart from constituency preference. This finding refutes the hypothesis, popular in certain circles, that ours is a more or less perfect political market with little or no scope for ideologically driven voting by legislators.     

A precise method for evaluating election schemes

A previously published paper evaluated election schemes under a wide variety of election circumstances. This paper improves upon the previous work by refining the measures used to rate the election schemes and increasing the statistical significance of those ratings. With these modifications, we can now draw some new conclusions:

1. In general circumstances, the Borda System outperforms the Copeland System which outperforms Approval which outperforms Majority Rule.
2. The Maximin Rule — strongly supported by Rawls's — turns out to be a reasonable election rule if the number of election alternatives is large relative to the number of voters.
3. With two exceptions, all our election systems performed quite well given a society with highly correlated utilities.
4. Given a polarized society, a serial dictatorship was better than every other election system except Borda.

Perhaps even more importantly, we now have the possibility of conducting some cost/benefit analyses of different proposals for electoral changes.     

Caring for the elderly: a European perspective on today and tomorrow

There is always a temptation to suppose that one's own problems (whether personal or national) are unique. They rarely are. The "problem" of the elderly is no exception and so there is no particular point in looking to the specific characteristics of one's own health, social service, and social security systems for causes. There is, however, every reason to be looking at them for the consequences. They can also exacerbate the causes. In this paper we sketch the principal features (economic, social, and demographic) that have contributed to the "problem" of the elderly in Europe and then outline the main intellectual issues that need to be explored and resolved. That sounds a bit pompous but, if one is to avoid an intellectual morass consisting of the various assertions about needs, obligations, and so on that emanate from rival concerned parties and various professional interests on the one hand, and simplistic political slogans whose only virtue is that they cut the Gordian Knot (but provide no real enlightenment) on the other, then we need to be doing just this. We shall take a few things for granted: that cost-containment is not the be-all-and-end-all of policy; that value for money depends equally on what you get as on what you spend; that overall expenditure per head is mainly determined by income per head (though some countries have managed to get and stay below the regression line); and that it "ain't so" that all one needs to do is to "leave it to the market." To have justified each of these would have taken too much space so we can only assert them and trust that, in swallowing these camels, you won't strain at the gnats to come.     

A contribution to the discussion of probabilities and human hair comparisons

The paper by Gaudette and Keeping on "An Attempt at Determining Probabilities in Human Scalp Hair Comparison" in the Journal of Forensic Sciences (Vol. 19, No. 3, July 1974, pp. 599-606) has provoked considerable controversy. This paper highlights two of the sources of the controversy and shows how the probability, 1/4500, quoted by Gaudette and Keeping should be treated with caution. The necessity of the use of a likelihood ratio statistic is described. It is suggested that the hair examination form resulting from the responses to the questionnaire recently distributed by the authors and also the discussions at Quantico (Proceedings of the International Symposium on Forensic Hair Comparisons, 25-27 June 1985, Quantico VA) should be used to facilitate the collection of the data which will be necessary to enable a likelihood ratio statistic to be estimated effectively.