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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Lockwood, Ben (University of Warwick); Le, Minh (University of Warwick); Rockey, James (University of Birmingham) |
| Abstract: | This paper explores the implications of voter loss-aversion and imperfect recall for the dynamics of electoral competition in a simple Downsian model of repeated elections. We first establish a benchmark result: when the voters’ reference point is forward-looking, there are a continuum of rational expectations equilibria (REE). When voters are backward-looking i.e. the reference point is last period’s recalled policy, interesting dynamics only emerge when voters have imperfect recall about that policy. Then, the interplay between the median voter’s reference point and political parties’ choice of platforms generates a dynamic process of polarization (or de-polarization). Under the assumption that parties are risk-neutral, platforms monotonically converge over time to a long-run equilibrium, which is always a REE. When parties are risk-averse, dynamic incentives also come into play, and generally lead to more policy moderation, resulting in equilibria that are more moderate than the most moderate REE JEL Classification: D72 ; D81 |
| Keywords: | electoral competition ; repeated elections ; loss-aversion ; imperfect recall ; advantage |
| Date: | 2021 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wrk:wqapec:12&r= |
| By: | Nicolas Lagios; Pierre-Guillaume Méon; Ilan Tojerow |
| Abstract: | We study how demonstrating against a far-right candidate changes the behavior of voters and ultimately impacts election results. To do so, we focus on the 2002 French runoff presidential elections which pitted far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen against the incumbent, Jacques Chirac. Between the two rounds of the election, demonstrators protested Le Pen’s quest for power at roughly 300 demonstrations. Using rainfall as an exogenous source of variation in demonstration attendance across municipalities, we find that larger protests reduced the number of votes for Le Pen and the number of abstentions and blank or invalid ballots, and increased the number of votes for Chirac. We show that this positive effect on voting for Chirac results from left-wing voters who did not cast a blank or invalid ballot and right-wing voters who switched from Le Pen to Chirac. Next, we focus on the mechanisms behind these results to find that the 2002 demonstrations both reduced support for the policies advocated by Le Pen and signaled that voting for him was socially undesirable. Finally, we provide evidence that demonstrations affected voting mainly through local media coverage and spread out beyond the municipalities that hosted the demonstrations. |
| Keywords: | Demonstration; Election; Protest; Far-right; Populism |
| JEL: | D72 |
| Date: | 2022–03–29 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:sol:wpaper:2013/341162&r= |
| By: | Lirong Xia |
| Abstract: | For centuries, it has been widely believed that the influence of a small coalition of voters is negligible in a large election. Consequently, there is a large body of literature on characterizing the asymptotic likelihood for an election to be influence, especially by the manipulation of a single voter, establishing an $O(\frac{1}{\sqrt n})$ upper bound and an $\Omega(\frac{1}{n^{67}})$ lower bound for many commonly studied voting rules under the i.i.d.~uniform distribution, known as Impartial Culture (IC) in social choice, where $n$ is the number is voters. In this paper, we extend previous studies in three aspects: (1) we consider a more general and realistic semi-random model that resembles the model in smoothed analysis, (2) we consider many coalitional influence problems, including coalitional manipulation, margin of victory, and various vote controls and bribery, and (3) we consider arbitrary and variable coalition size $B$. Our main theorem provides asymptotically tight bounds on the semi-random likelihood of the existence of a size-$B$ coalition that can successfully influence the election under a wide range of voting rules. Applications of the main theorem and its proof techniques resolve long-standing open questions about the likelihood of coalitional manipulability under IC, by showing that the likelihood is $\Theta\left(\min\left\{\frac{B}{\sqrt n}, 1\right\}\right)$ for many commonly studied voting rules. The main technical contribution is a characterization of the semi-random likelihood for a Poisson multinomial variable (PMV) to be unstable, which we believe to be a general and useful technique with independent interest. |
| Date: | 2022–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2202.06411&r= |
| By: | Puppe, Clemens; Rollmann, Jana |
| Abstract: | We study the effect on the participation rate of employing different voting rules in the context of the problem to allocate a fixed monetary budget to two different public projects. Specifically, we compare the mean rule according to which the average of the individually proposed allocations is implemented with the median rule which chooses the allocation proposed by the median voter as the social outcome. We report the results of a field experiment in which subjects (students of KIT) could allocate money to fund two different public projects, the student's bike shop and a campus garden project. The treatment variable was the collective decision rule employed. While the mean and median rules have very different properties in theory, we found no significant treatment effect on the participation rate. Our results nevertheless shed important light on the use of different voting rules in the context of budget allocation in practice. |
| Date: | 2022 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:kitwps:155&r= |
| By: | John Duffy (Department of Economics, University of California, Irvine, California, 92697); Seung Han Yoo (Department of Economics, Korea University, 145 Anam-ro, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul, Republic of Korea, 02841) |
| Abstract: | We provide a model of group sorting or polarization based on group identity alone. In our model, agents differ from one another in terms of a binary group identity. Groups may also differ in terms of the distribution of abilities, but the distribution of abilities by group is uncertain and both groups are ex-ante equally likely to be distributed in the same way. Each agent's ability is private information, but group identity is publicly observable. Young agents make a decision as to which of two locations they will reside in when old and play a stage game with others when they are old, based on their private histories from a previous stage game played in the location where they were born (and young). We show that, in equilibrium, agents endogenously sort themselves according to their group identity to two different locations under rational belief updating, and we identify conditions under which the society becomes completely polarized with members of each group rationally choosing to congregate in distinct locations. |
| Keywords: | Polarization, group bias, homophily, private monitoring, sorting, Bayesian learning. |
| JEL: | C72 C73 D83 |
| Date: | 2022 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iek:wpaper:2202&r= |
| By: | Matthias Lalisse (Johns Hopkins University) |
| Abstract: | How much does money drive legislative outcomes in the United States? In this article, we use aggregated campaign finance data as well as a Transformer based text embedding model to predict roll call votes for legislation in the US Congress with more than 90% accuracy. In a series of model comparisons in which the input feature sets are varied, we investigate the extent to which campaign finance is predictive of voting behavior in comparison with variables like partisan affiliation. We find that the financial interests backing a legislator's campaigns are independently predictive in both chambers of Congress, but also uncover a sizable asymmetry between the Senate and the House of Representatives. These findings are cross-referenced with a Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) linking legislators' financial and voting records, in which we show that "legislators who vote together get paid together", again discovering an asymmetry between the House and the Senate in the additional predictive power of campaign finance once party is accounted for. We suggest an explanation of these facts in terms of Thomas Ferguson's Investment Theory of Party Competition: due to a number of structural differences between the House and Senate, but chiefly the lower amortized cost of obtaining individuated influence with Senators, political investors prefer operating on the House using the party as a proxy. |
| Keywords: | campaign finance, congressional voting, investment theory of party competition, machine learning, Representational Similarity Analysis, political money |
| JEL: | H10 D72 P16 C45 |
| Date: | 2022–02–22 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:thk:wpaper:inetwp178&r= |
| By: | Kai Hao Yang (Cowles Foundation and School of Management, Yale University); Alexander K. Zentefis (Yale School of Management) |
| Abstract: | We assess the capacity of gerrymandering to undermine the will of the people in a representative democracy. Citizens have political positions represented on a spectrum, and electoral maps separate people into districts. We show that unrestrained gerrymandering can severely distort the composition of a legislature, potentially leading half the population to lose all representation of their views. This means that, under majority rule in the congress, gerrymandering enables politicians to enact any legislation of their choice as long as it falls within the interquartile range of the political spectrum. Just as worrisome, gerrymandering can rig any legislation to pass instead of the median policy, which would otherwise prevail in a referendum against any other choice. |
| Keywords: | Gerrymandering, representatives, legislature, Bayesian persuasion |
| JEL: | D72 D78 D82 K16 |
| Date: | 2022–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cwl:cwldpp:2328&r= |
| By: | Köppl-Turyna, Monika; Kantorowicz, Jarosław |
| Abstract: | This work looks at the impact of electoral rules on female participation in local legislative bodies using a natural experiment involving a series of changes to electoral law in Poland. Using an exogenous population threshold dividing municipalities into ones with proportional and ones with majoritarian elections, we estimate the effect of each electoral system on female representation. Contrary to the literature on the national elections, we ftnd that more females are elected to local councils under a majoritarian system. We link this observation to countering party bias in list placements and lower costs of electoral participation in the majoritarian system. |
| Keywords: | electoral rules,forms of government,female representation,regression discontinuity |
| JEL: | D72 |
| Date: | 2022 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:ecoarp:18&r= |
| By: | Williams, Geoffrey; Ginzel, Matthew D.; Ma, Zhao; Adams, Damian C.; Campbell, Faith; Lovett, Gary M.; Pildain, María Belén; Raffa, Kenneth F.; Gandhi, Kamal J. K.; Santini, Alberto |
| Abstract: | Society is confronted by interconnected threats to ecological sustainability. Among these is the devastation of forests by destructive non-native pathogens and insects introduced through global trade, leading to the loss of critical ecosystem services and a global forest health crisis. We argue that the forest health crisis is a public good social dilemma and propose a response framework that incorporates principles of collective action. This framework will enable scientists to better engage policymakers and empower the public to advocate for proactive biosecurity and forest health management. Collective action in forest health will feature broadly inclusive stakeholder engagement to build trust and set goals; accountability for destructive pest introductions; pooled support for weakest-link partners; and inclusion of intrinsic and non-market values of forest ecosystems in risk assessment. We provide short-term and longer-term measures that incorporate the above principles to shift the societal and ecological forest health paradigm to a more resilient state. |
| Date: | 2022–03–10 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:ecoevo:k9jdy&r= |
| By: | Maria Montero (School of Economics, University of Nottingham); Alex Possajennikov (School of Economics, University of Nottingham) |
| Abstract: | This paper studies a simple process of demand adjustment in cooperative games. In the process, a randomly chosen player makes the highest possible demand subject to the demands of other coalition members being satisfied. This process converges to the aspiration set; in convex games, this implies convergence to the core. We further introduce perturbations into the process, where players sometimes make a higher demand than feasible. These perturbations make the set of separating aspirations, i.e., demand vectors in which no player is indispensable in order for other players to achieve their demands, the one most resistant to mutations. We fully analyze this process for 3-player games. We further look at weighted majority games with two types of players. In these games, if the coalition of all small players is winning, the process converges to the unique separating aspiration; otherwise, there are many separating aspirations and the process reaches a neighbourhood of a separating aspiration. |
| Keywords: | demand adjustment, aspirations, core, stochastic stability |
| Date: | 2022–05 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:not:notcdx:2022-05&r= |
| By: | Hager, Anselm (Humbodt-Universität); Valasek, Justin (Dept. of Economics, Norwegian School of Economics and Business Administration) |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we study how forced migration impacts the in-group and out-group social capital of Syrian refugees and the host population in Northern Lebanon by administering a novel survey experiment in which we manipulate the salience of the migration experience (for refugees) and the refugee crisis (for the host population). Additionally, we study the social spillovers to Palestinians, an established refugee population in Lebanon. We find that the impact of forced migration is largely restricted to the Syrian refugee-Lebanese host population channel, and that it increases the relative disparity between in-group and out-group social capital. This may cause refugees to favor in-group interactions and therefore forgo more economically advantageous interactions with out-group members. |
| Keywords: | Refugees; Migration; Social Capital; Experiment; Ethnicity |
| JEL: | C90 D91 J15 |
| Date: | 2022–03–15 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hhs:nhheco:2022_005&r= |
| By: | Davis, John B. (Department of Economics Marquette University) |
| Abstract: | This paper characterizes a pandemic as one kind of contagion, and defines a contagion as a two-level, two-direction, reflexive feedback loop system. In such a system, experts' opinions can act as self-fulfilling prophecies that significantly influence social behavior. Also, when multiple experts produce multiple, expert opinions can fragment a society's response to a pandemic worsening rather than ameliorating it. This paper models this with two competing expert opinions, associates them with club good and common pool goods types of circumstances, and argues that to combat fragmentation of opinion a focus on public health public good provision needs to be framed in public choice terms, specifically as choices regarding the nature of democratic deliberative institutions. From a constitutional political economy perspective, it argues this entails asking how public reasoning processes can function in an 'inclusive and noncoercive' way that allows society to reconcile competing visions regarding such issues as how to combat a pandemic. |
| Keywords: | COVID-19, contagion, self-fulfilling prophecy, public health, club goods, common pool goods, public choice, democratic deliberation |
| JEL: | H41 H70 I10 A13 |
| Date: | 2022–03 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:mrq:wpaper:2022-03&r= |