A foundation for strategic agenda voting

We offer complete characterizations of the equilibrium outcomes of two prominent agenda voting institutions that are widely used in the democratic world: the amendment, also known as the Anglo-American procedure, and the successive, or equivalently the Euro-Latin procedure. Our axiomatic approach provides a proper understanding of these voting institutions, and allows comparisons between them, and with other voting procedures.Strategic Voting, Agendas, Committees, Institutions, Axioms

Parliamentary Voting Procedures: Agenda Control, Manipulation, and Uncertainty

We study computational problems for two popular parliamentary voting procedures: the amendment procedure and the successive procedure. While finding successful manipulations or agenda controls is tractable for both procedures, our real-world experimental results indicate that most elections cannot be manipulated by a few voters and agenda control is typically impossible. If the voter preferences are incomplete, then finding which alternatives can possibly win is NP-hard for both procedures. Whilst deciding if an alternative necessarily wins is coNP-hard for the amendment procedure, it is polynomial-time solvable for the successive one

Catalyzing Regional Economic Transformation: Lessons from Funder Collaboration in Northeast Ohio

Northeast Ohio -- home to four major metropolitan areas, more than 4 million people and a $180 billion regional economy -- faced in 2004 what the Cleveland Plain Dealer dubbed a "Quiet Crisis." Employment growth in the region had lagged the rest of the nation for the prior two decades and manufacturing's share of total regional employment had fallen by half. The population was declining and poverty was on the rise, particularly in urban areas.Community and private foundations were waging an uphill battle responding to the increasing needs for social services that were straining the resources of nonprofits in the region. Philanthropic organizations were quickly coming to the realization that the only way to meaningfully address the challenges of poverty and unemployment would be through a more holistic effort to promote regional economic opportunity. In response, a set of philanthropic institutions from across Northeast Ohio launched the Fund for Our Economic Future (the "Fund") in 2004 to promote a regional approach for increasing economic prosperity and opportunity. The original 28 Fund members committed a total of$30 million over three years to begin restoring regional economic competitiveness through pooled grantmaking, research and convening. The Fund's experience produced several lessons about fostering effective collaboration that apply to business, nonprofit and government leaders partnering in any region to address systemic issues. The report provides details in each of these areas

Foundations for Civic Impact: Advocacy and Civic Engagement Toolkit for Private Foundations

Offers guidance for private foundations on supporting grantees' policy and civic engagement activities, including rationale, rules for private foundations as grantmakers and as advocates, sample grantmaking materials, success stories, and resources

Dynamic Elite Partisanship: Party Loyalty and Agenda Setting in the U.S. House

Legislators and legislative parties must strike a balance between collective and member-level goals. While there are legislative and reputational returns to co-ordinated behavior, partisan loyalty has a detrimental effect on members’ electoral success. This article argues that members and parties navigate these competing forces by pursuing partisan legislation when the threat of electoral repercussions is relatively low – when elections are distant. This study tests our theory by examining US House members’ likelihood of voting with their party on both partisan and non-divisive votes during the course of the election cycle in order to assess whether members strategically alter their levels of party loyalty as elections approach. It also explores whether majority parties strategically structure the agenda according to variation in members’ electoral constraints. This approach allows elite partisanship to follow a dynamic process, which is referred to here as dynamic elite partisanship. The results demonstrate that as elections approach, members are less likely to cast party votes, and parties are less inclined to schedule votes that divide the parties. At the same time, the study finds no evidence of strategic variation in members’ voting behavior on broadly consensual votes with election proximity

Joyce Foundation - 2007 Annual Report

Contains president's message, program information, grants list, financial statements, and lists of board members and staff

Single-Crossing, Strategic Voting and the Median Choice Rule

This paper studies the strategic foundations of the Representative Voter Theorem (Rothstein, 1991), also called the "second version" of the Median Voter Theorem. As a by-product, it also considers the existence of non-trivial strategy-proof social choice functions over the domain of single-crossing preference profiles. The main result presented here is that single-crossing preferences constitute a domain restriction on the real line that allows not only majority voting equilibria, but also non-manipulable choice rules. In particular, this is true for the median choice rule, which is found to be strategy-proof and group-strategic-proof not only over the full set of alternatives, but also over every possible policy agenda. The paper also shows the close relation between single-crossing and order-restriction. And it uses this relation together with the strategy-proofness of the median choice rule to prove that the collective outcome predicted by the Representative Voter Theorem can be implemented in dominant strategies through a simple mechanism in which, first, individuals select a representative among themselves, and then the representative voter chooses a policy to be implemented by the planner.Single-crossing; order-restriction; median voter; strategyproofness.

Strategic Power Revisited

Traditional power indices ignore preferences and strategic interaction. Equilibrium analysis of particular non-cooperative decision procedures is unsuitable for normative analysis and assumes typically unavailable information. These points drive a lingering debate about the right approach to power analysis. A unified framework that works both sides of the street is developed here. It rests on a notion of a posteriori power which formalizes players' marginal impact to outcomes in cooperative and non-cooperative games, for strategic interaction and purely random behaviour. Taking expectations with respect to preferences, actions, and procedures then defines a meaningful a priori measure. Established indices turn out to be special cases.power indices, spatial voting, equilibrium analysis, decision procedures

The Effect of Agenda for Change on the Career Progression of the Radiographic Workforce 2009

Report compiled by the University of Hertfordshire in collaboration with the Inst for Employment Studies and Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust for the Society and College of RadiographersFinal Published versio