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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Stensholt, Eivind (Dept. of Business and Management Science, Norwegian School of Economics) |
| Abstract: | In MMP-elections for legislatures, political parties compete for a voter’s support in two ways: for a first vote to the party’s candidate in a single-seat constituency and for a second vote to the party’s list of candidates. To obtain party representation proportional to the second votes, a nationwide second vote tally compensates with list seats to parties with a sub-proportional number of constituency seats. The German Bundestag has 299 constituency seats, and 299 list seats is the legal norm, but it got 410 list seats in the 2017 election. This deviation also violates a principle, stated by the federal constitutional court, that voters have equal influence. First and second vote may support different parties, but in the same ballot. The ballots’ combinations of first and second vote are essential for approximation of both proportionality and the legal norm. Unfortunately, the combinations are ignored: The result would have been the same if first and second votes had been collected in separate ballot boxes. Compensation based on “faithful accounting” uses the combinations to represent the set Λ(P) of voters with second vote to party P according to the set’s size, rather than representing P itself, while keeping the number of list seats close to the norm. Another seat reduction, of 42 seats with 2017 data, is obtained if CDU and CSU, working as one party in the Bundestag, also run as one party in elections. |
| Keywords: | Mixed member proportional; equal influence; legitimacy; assembly size |
| JEL: | D72 |
| Date: | 2021–07–14 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:nhhfms:2021_007&r= |
| By: | Ignacio Lago |
| Abstract: | This paper examines the adoption of electoral systems in the last two centuries. I argue that proportional representation (PR) was adopted to make party mobilization more effective when majoritarian electoral systems with many and geographically small districts were no longer an efficient response to the problem of collective action in mass elections. With the expansion of suffrage and the parallel process of national integration, mass parties became technologically feasible and took care of bringing voters to the ballot box. As primary and secondary mobilization are more effective in electoral systems with few and geographically large districts, majoritarian rules were progressively replaced with proportional rules. PR was endorsed by those parties that found it easier to attract voters using a single mobilization strategy with strong economics of scale, and resisted by locally focused parties. This argument is tested using longitudinal and cross section data at both the country and party levels. |
| Keywords: | Collective Action; Electoral System; Nationalization; Mobilization; Political Parties; Proportional Representation. |
| JEL: | H72 H74 H77 |
| Date: | 2021–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:gov:wpaper:2102&r= |
| By: | Elsa Leromain (UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES)); Gonzague Vannoorenberghe (UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES)) |
| Abstract: | We study how Covid-related risk affected participation across the French territory in the March 2020 local elections. We document that participation went down disproportionately in towns exposed to higher Covid-19 risk. Towns that lean towards the far-right saw a stronger drop in turnout, in particular in the vicinity of clusters. We argue that these patterns are partly a result of risk perceptions, and not only of political considerations. We use data on the drop in cinema admissions in early March 2020 and show that these went down more around infection clusters, especially in areas with substantial vote for the far-right. Taken together, our findings suggest that the fear of Covid-19 may have been on average more prevalent among far-right voters, contributing to a drop in their electoral participation. |
| Keywords: | Electoral turnout, Local elections, Covid-19, Far-right |
| JEL: | D74 |
| Date: | 2021–07–08 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ctl:louvir:2021016&r= |
| By: | Laurent Bouton; Aniol Llorente-Saguer; Antonin Macé; Dimitrios Xefteris |
| Abstract: | This paper studies voting in shareholders meetings. We focus on the informational efficiency of different voting mechanisms, taking into account that they affect both management's incentives before the meeting and shareholders' decisions at the meeting. We first focus on the case in which the management does not affect the proposal being voted on. We prove that, for any distribution of shareholdings, the one-share-one-vote mechanism (1S1V) dominates the one-person-one-vote mechanism (1P1V), independently of whether or how shareholdings correlate with information accuracy. We also show that 1S1V becomes efficient only if votes are fully divisible. Second, we consider the case in which the management decides whether to put the proposal to a vote. The properties of a voting mechanism then depend both on its voting efficiency and on how it affects managers' incentives to select good proposals. We uncover a trade-off between selection and voting efficiency underlying the comparison of 1S1V and 1P1V: the higher voting efficiency of 1S1V implies worse selection incentives. In some cases, the negative effect of worse selection incentives on shareholders' welfare can be large enough to wash out the higher voting efficiency of 1S1V. |
| JEL: | D72 G3 |
| Date: | 2021–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29005&r= |
| By: | Guido Merzoni; Federico Trombetta |
| Abstract: | We study the implications of state dependent costs of policy mismatch in political agency models where politicians have reputational concerns and "good" politicians share the same objectives with the voters. We find that state-dependent costs can increase the set of parameters where pandering is an equilibrium strategy. Indeed, in our model, pandering can arise even without office rents. Moreover, we show that voters do not necessarily prefer biased politicians to be in favour of the policy that produces the cheapest expected cost of mismatch. We discuss the implications of those results for populism, environmental policies and the equilibrium incentives to over- or under-provide lockdowns or other mitigation measures. |
| JEL: | D72 D78 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:dis:wpaper:dis2102&r= |
| By: | Dmitry Levando |
| Abstract: | We study coalition structure formation with intra and inter-coalition externalities in the introduced family of nested non-cooperative simultaneous finite games. A non-cooperative game embeds a coalition structure formation mechanism, and has two outcomes: an allocation of players over coalitions and a payoff for every player. Coalition structures of a game are described by Young diagrams. They serve to enumerate coalition structures and allocations of players over them. For every coalition structure a player has a set of finite strategies. A player chooses a coalition structure and a strategy. A (social) mechanism eliminates conflicts in individual choices and produces final coalition structures. Every final coalition structure is a non-cooperative game. Mixed equilibrium always exists and consists of a mixed strategy profile, payoffs and equilibrium coalition structures. We use a maximum coalition size to parametrize the family of the games. The non-cooperative game of Nash is a partial case of the model. The result is different from the Shapley value, a strong Nash, coalition-proof equilibria, core solutions, and other equilibrium concepts. We supply few non-cooperative coalition structure stability criteria. |
| Date: | 2021–07 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2107.00711&r= |
| By: | Eric Jacobson |
| Abstract: | Previous research has shown a relationship between voter characteristics and voter support for tax bonds. These findings, however, are difficult to interpret because of the high degree of collinearity across the measures. From 13 demographic measures of voters in a library bond election, seven independent principal components were extracted which accounted for 95 percent of the variance. Whereas the direct demographic measures showed inconsistent relationships with voting, the principal components of low SES, college experience, female and service job were related to affirmative voting, while high home value was related to negative voting. |
| Date: | 2021–06 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2107.01095&r= |
| By: | Julien Jacob; Eve-Angéline Lambert; Mathieu Lefebvre; Sarah Van Driessche |
| Abstract: | We experimentally investigate the impact of information disclosure on managing collective harms that are caused jointly by a group of liable agents. Subjects interact in a public bad setting and must choose ex ante how much to contribute in order to reduce the probability of causing a common damage. If a damage occurs, subjects bear a part of the loss according to the liability-sharing rule in force.We consider two existing rules: a per capita rule and a proportional rule. Our aim is to analyze the relative impact of information disclosure under each rule. We show that information disclosure increases contributions only under a per capita rule. This result challenges the classical results regarding the positive effects of information disclosure, since we show that this impact may depend upon the legal context. We also show that while a proportional rule leads to higher contributions than a per capita one, the positive effect of disclosure on a per capita rule makes it as efficient as a proportional rule without information disclosure. |
| Keywords: | Information disclosure; Collective harms; Environmental Regulation; Liability Sharing Rules; Public Bads; Multiple Tortfeasors. |
| JEL: | C92 H41 K13 K32 Q53 |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ulp:sbbeta:2021-30&r= |