3,423 research outputs found
Equitable voting rules
May's Theorem (1952), a celebrated result in social choice, provides the
foundation for majority rule. May's crucial assumption of symmetry, often
thought of as a procedural equity requirement, is violated by many choice
procedures that grant voters identical roles. We show that a weakening of May's
symmetry assumption allows for a far richer set of rules that still treat
voters equally. We show that such rules can have minimal winning coalitions
comprising a vanishing fraction of the population, but not less than the square
root of the population size. Methodologically, we introduce techniques from
group theory and illustrate their usefulness for the analysis of social choice
questions.Comment: 43 pages, 5 figure
The Other Election Controversy of Y2K: Core First Amendment Values and High-Tech Political Coalitions
As the 2000 campaign reached its climax, some renegade supporters of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader countered criticsâ charges that they were âhanding the election to Bushâ by creating websites encouraging vote-swapping. The theory of this practice was: A Nader supporter in a hotly contested state would agree to vote for Al Gore if a Gore supporter in an uncontested state would vote for Ralph Nader. The object was to help deliver five percent of the popular vote to the Green Party (so that the Greens would receive federal matching funds for the 2004 presidential election) while simultaneously working to prevent a George W. Bush presidency. With the election less than a week away, and the poll margins closer than any election in recent history, several state election officials acted to snuff out the online vote-swapping movement by threatening vote-swap site operators with fines and/or imprisonment. The chilling effect brought about by the letters from state regulators may have tipped the scales in the 2000 campaign, even though no one knew whether prohibiting vote-swapping was constitutional. This study introduces the reader to the concept and practice of vote-swapping. It examines the chilling effect of the threats of prosecution issued during the 2000 election and these effectsâ possible electoral consequences. This study analyzes online vote-swapping under various state laws and state constitutions and extends the analysis to encompass federal election law and federal constitutional law. Finally, this study examines the ethics of vote-swapping and concludes that the practice is legal under most state election laws, protected under most state constitutions, protected by the federal Constitution, and an ethical use of personal voting power
Spartan Daily, November 8, 2000
Volume 115, Issue 49https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9616/thumbnail.jp
Untuned Keyboards: Online Campaigners, Citizens, and Portals in the 2002 Elections
Presents findings from a survey conducted in October and November 2002. Looks at the role that the major portals of Web traffic, online campaigners, and Internet users who got political news online played at the highlight of the 2002 mid-term elections
ICT Strategies of Democratic Intermediaries
A conceptual framework is proposed for discussing the ICT strategies of intermediaries and their effects on democratic intermediation. The main line of reasoning is that both âdisintermediationâ and âre-intermediationâ have to be related to specific models of democracy and styles of citizenship. The linkage strategies of preference intermediaries, the supportive strategies of information intermediaries and the facilitative strategies of interaction intermediaries are discussed. The quality of democracy would be dependent on the interplay between different democratic practices, types of citizenship and intermediaries
Giving voters what they want? Party orientation perceptions and preferences in the British electorate
Some of the most important propositions in the political marketing literature hinge on assumptions about the electorate. In particular, voters are presumed to react in different ways to different orientations or postures. Yet there are theoretical reasons for questioning some of these assumptions, and certainly they have seldom been empirically tested. Here, we focus on one prominent example of political marketing research: Lees-Marshmentâs orientationsâ model. We investigate how the public reacts to product and market orientation, whether they see a trade-off between the two (a point in dispute among political marketing scholars), and whether partisans differ from non-partisan voters by being more inclined to value product over market orientation. Evidence from two mass sample surveys of the British public (both conducted online by YouGov) demonstrates important heterogeneity within the electorate, casts doubt on the core assumptions underlying some political marketing arguments and raises broader questions about what voters are looking for in a party
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