72,235 research outputs found
Heuristics in Multi-Winner Approval Voting
In many real world situations, collective decisions are made using voting.
Moreover, scenarios such as committee or board elections require voting rules
that return multiple winners. In multi-winner approval voting (AV), an agent
may vote for as many candidates as they wish. Winners are chosen by tallying up
the votes and choosing the top- candidates receiving the most votes. An
agent may manipulate the vote to achieve a better outcome by voting in a way
that does not reflect their true preferences. In complex and uncertain
situations, agents may use heuristics to strategize, instead of incurring the
additional effort required to compute the manipulation which most favors them.
In this paper, we examine voting behavior in multi-winner approval voting
scenarios with complete information. We show that people generally manipulate
their vote to obtain a better outcome, but often do not identify the optimal
manipulation. Instead, voters tend to prioritize the candidates with the
highest utilities. Using simulations, we demonstrate the effectiveness of these
heuristics in situations where agents only have access to partial information
Polling bias and undecided voter allocations: US Presidential elections, 2004 - 2016
Accounting for undecided and uncertain voters is a challenging issue for
predicting election results from public opinion polls. Undecided voters typify
the uncertainty of swing voters in polls but are often ignored or allocated to
each candidate in a simple, deterministic manner. Historically this may have
been adequate because the undecided were comparatively small enough to assume
that they do not affect the relative proportions of the decided voters.
However, in the presence of high numbers of undecided voters, these static
rules may in fact bias election predictions from election poll authors and
meta-poll analysts. In this paper, we examine the effect of undecided voters in
the 2016 US presidential election to the previous three presidential elections.
We show there were a relatively high number of undecided voters over the
campaign and on election day, and that the allocation of undecided voters in
this election was not consistent with two-party proportional (or even)
allocations. We find evidence that static allocation regimes are inadequate for
election prediction models and that probabilistic allocations may be superior.
We also estimate the bias attributable to polling agencies, often referred to
as "house effects".Comment: 32 pages, 9 figures, 6 table
Voting and the Cardinal Aggregation of Judgments
The paper elaborates the idea that voting is an instance of the aggregation of judgments, this being a more general concept than the aggregation of preferences. To aggregate judgments one must first measure them. I show that such aggregation has been unproblematic whenever it has been based on an independent and unrestricted scale. The scales analyzed in voting theory are either context dependent or subject to unreasonable restrictions. This is the real source of the diverse 'paradoxes of voting' that would better be termed 'voting pathologies'. The theory leads me to advocate what I term evaluative voting. It can also be called utilitarian voting as it is based on having voters express their cardinal preferences. The alternative that maximizes the sum wins. This proposal operationalizes, in an election context, the abstract cardinal theories of collective choice due to Fleming and Harsanyi. On pragmatic grounds, I argue for a three valued scale for general elections
Vote-Trading in International Institutions
There is evidence that countries trade votes among each other in international institutions on a wide range of issues, including the use of force, trade issues and elections of judges. Vote-trading has been criticized as being a form of corruption, undue influence and coercion. Contrary to common wisdom, however, I argue in this paper that the case for introducing policy measures against vote-trading cannot be made out on the basis of available evidence. This paper sets out an analytical framework for analyzing vote-trading in international institutions, focusing on three major contexts in which vote-trading may generate benefits and costs: (1) agency costs (collective good), (2) coercive tendering and (3) agency costs (constituents). The applicability of each context depends primarily on the type of decision in question - i.e. preference-decision or judgment-decision - and the interests that countries are expected to maximize when voting. The analytical framework is applied to evidence of vote-trading in four institutions, the Security Council, the General Assembly, the World Trade Organization and the International Whaling Commission. The application of the analysis reveals that while vote-trading can create significant costs, there is only equivocal evidence to this effect, and in several cases vote-trading generates important benefits
‘A Europe without walls, without fences, without borders’: a desecuritisation of migration doomed to fail
It has been commonly argued that amid the so-called ‘migration crisis’ in 2015, Greece ignored its Dublin Regulation obligations due to unprecedentedly high migration flows, structural weaknesses, fears and uncertainty. However, this narrative deprives the Greek government of agency. In contrast, this article puts forward an alternative analysis of Greece’s attitude. It argues that the Greek government’s policy choices in the realms of border controls, migration and asylum in 2015, prior to the ‘EU–Turkey deal’, manifested a well-calculated desecuritisation strategy with a twofold aim. In this respect, this article provides an analysis of why and how the newly elected SYRIZA-led coalition government embarked on a desecuritising move and assesses the success/effectiveness of this move and the desecuritisation strategy. It argues that although the government’s desecuritising move was successful, overall, its desecuritisation strategy failed to produce the anticipated results vis-à -vis the government’s twofold aim and intended outcomes
Lending Cycles and Real Outcomes: Costs of Political Misalignment. LEQS Paper No. 139/2018 December 2018
We document a strong political cycle in bank credit and industry outcomes in Turkey.
In line with theories of tactical redistribution, state-owned banks systematically adjust
their lending around local elections compared with private banks in the same province
based on electoral competition and political alignment of incumbent mayors. This
effect only exists in corporate lending as opposed to consumer loans. It creates credit
constraints for firms in opposition areas, which suffer drops in employment and sales
but not firm entry. There is substantial misallocation of financial resources as
provinces and industries with high initial efficiency suffer the greatest constraints
The New Theory of Strategic Voting
This is an analysis of strategic voting under qualified majority voting. Existing formal analyses of the plurality rule predict complete coordination of strategic voting: a strict interpretation of Duverger's Law. This conclusion is rejected. Unlike previous models, the popular support for each option is not commonly certain. Agents base their vote on both public and private signals of popular support. When private signals are the main source of information, the uniquely stable equilibrium entails only limited strategic voting and hence partial coordination. This is due to the surprising presence of negative feedback --- strategic voting is a self-attenuating phenomenon. The theory leads to the conclusion that multi-candidate support in a plurality electoral system is perfectly consistent with rational voting behaviour.
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