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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Masayuki Odora (Graduate School of Economics, Waseda University) |
| Abstract: | This study considers a binary election in which imperfectly informed voters have partially conflicting interests. There is an unambiguously correct alternative in some states, while voters disagree on the better alternative in other states. The true state is unknown to anybody, but each voter receives a private signal about the state. This study identifies the circumstances in which the probability that a society utilizing the majority rule reaches the correct decisions does not converge to 1, thus showing the failure of an asymptotic Condorcet Jury Theorem. Moreover, we show that the voting behavior never reflects voters’ private information in the large elections. |
| Keywords: | bargaining; Information aggregation; partially conflicting interests; Condorcet Jury Theorem |
| Date: | 2024–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wap:wpaper:2308&r=cdm |
| By: | Maxim Senkov; Arseniy Samsonov |
| Abstract: | We compare two scenarios in a model where politicians offer local public goods to heterogeneous voters: one where politicians have access to data on voters and thus can target specific ones, and another where politicians only decide on the level of spending. When the budget is small, or the public good has a high value, access to voter information leads the winner to focus on poorer voters, enhancing voter welfare. With a larger budget or less crucial public goods, politicians target a narrow group of swing voters, which harms the voter welfare. |
| Date: | 2024–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2401.04273&r=cdm |
| By: | Raphaël Franck; Victor Gay |
| Abstract: | This study argues that urbanization changed the relationship between the occupation of candidates running in parliamentary elections and their electoral success. To identify local-level variation in urbanization, we leverage exogenous changes to the boundaries of electoral constituencies in the 1928, 1932, and 1936 French parliamentary elections. The results suggest that urbanization was detrimental to the electoral success of lawyers but beneficial to that of employees and workers. This electoral effect of urbanization was especially felt on the left of the political spectrum, whereby left-wing employees and workers crowded out left-wing lawyers. |
| Keywords: | elections, political representation, urbanization |
| JEL: | D72 K16 N44 N94 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10885&r=cdm |
| By: | Luca Bellodi; Frédéric Docquier; Stefano Iandolo; Massimo Morelli; Riccardo Turati |
| Abstract: | We study the effect of local exposure to populism on net population movements by citizenship status, gender, age and education level in the context of Italian municipalities. We present two research designs to estimate the causal effect of populist attitudes and politics. Initially, we use a combination of collective memory and trigger variables as an instrument for the variation in populist vote shares across national elections. Subsequently, we apply a regression discontinuity design to estimate the effect of electing a populist mayor on population movements. We establish three converging findings. First, the exposure to both populist attitudes and policies, as manifested by the vote share of populist parties in national election or the close-election of a new populist mayor, reduces the attractiveness of municipalities, leading to larger population outflows. Second, the effect is particularly pronounced among young, female, and highly educated natives, who tend to relocate across Italian municipalities rather than internationally. Third, we do not find any effect on the foreign population. Our results highlight a foot-voting mechanism that may contribute to a political polarization in Italian municipalities. |
| Keywords: | Migration; Human Capital; Populism; Italian Politics |
| JEL: | D72 |
| Date: | 2024–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:irs:cepswp:2024-01&r=cdm |
| By: | Clark, Andrew Eric; Cotofan, Maria Alexandra |
| Abstract: | It is well-known that the wealthier are more likely to have Right-leaning political preferences. We here in addition consider the role of the individual's starting position, and in particular their upward social mobility relative to their parents. In 18 waves of UK panel data, both own and parental social status are independently positively associated with Right-leaning voting and political preferences: given their own social status, the upwardly-mobile are therefore more Left-wing. We investigate a number of potential mediators: these results do not reflect the relationship between well-being and own and parents' social status but are rather linked to the individual's beliefs about how fair society is. |
| Keywords: | social mobility; voting; redistribution; satisfaction; fairness |
| JEL: | A14 C25 D31 D63 J28 J62 |
| Date: | 2023–07–21 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:121296&r=cdm |
| By: | Upward, Richard; Wright, Peter |
| Abstract: | We provide new evidence on the effects of economic shocks on political support, voting behaviour and political opinions over the last 25 years. We exploit a sudden, large and long-lasting shock in the form of job loss and trace out its impact on individual political outcomes for up to 10 years after the event. The availability of detailed information on households before and after the job loss event allows us to reweight a comparison group to closely mimic the job losers in terms of their observable characteristics, pre-existing political support and voting behaviour. We find consistent, long-lasting but quantitatively small effects on support and votes for the incumbent party, and short-lived effects on political engagement. We find limited impact on the support for fringe or populist parties. In the context of Brexit, opposition to the EU was much higher amongst those who lost their jobs, but this was largely due to pre-existing differences which were not exacerbated by the job loss event itself. |
| Keywords: | job loss, political support, voting |
| JEL: | C21 C23 D72 J63 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:iwhdps:281194&r=cdm |
| By: | Wesley H. Holliday |
| Abstract: | In the context of social choice theory with ordinal preferences, we say that the defensible set is the set of alternatives $x$ such that for any alternative $y$, if $y$ beats $x$ in a head-to-head majority comparison, then there is an alternative $z$ that beats $y$ in a head-to-head majority comparison by a margin at least as large as the margin by which $y$ beat $x$. We show that any ordinal voting method satisfying two well-known axioms from voting theory--positive involvement and the Condorcet winner criterion--refines the defensible set. Using this lemma, we prove an impossibility theorem: there is no such voting method that also satisfies the Condorcet loser criterion, resolvability, and a common invariance property for Condorcet methods, namely that the choice of winners depends only on the relative sizes of majority margins. |
| Date: | 2024–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2401.05657&r=cdm |