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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Bernhardt, Dan (Department of Economics, University of Illinois and Department of Economics, University of Warwick,); Krasa, Stefan (Department of Economics, University of Illinois); Squintani, Francesco (Department of Economics, University of Warwick) |
| Abstract: | We develop a model of strategic voting in a spatial setting with multiple candidates when voters have both expressive and instrumental concerns. The model endogenizes the strategic coordination of voters, yet is flexible enough to allow the analysis of political platform competition by policy-motivated candidates. We characterize all strategic voting equilibria in a three-candidate setting. Highlighting the utility of our approach, we analyze a setting with two mainstream and a spoiler candidate, showing that the spoiler can gain from entering, even though she has no chance of winning the election and reduces the winning probability of her preferred mainstream candidate. |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wrk:wqapec:21&r=cdm |
| By: | Grzegorz Pierczy\'nski; Stanis{\l}aw Szufa |
| Abstract: | We study the setting of single-winner elections with ordinal preferences where candidates might be members of \emph{alliances} (which may correspond to e.g., political parties, factions, or coalitions). However, we do not assume that candidates from the same alliance are necessarily adjacent in voters' rankings. In such case, every classical voting rule is vulnerable to the spoiler effect, i.e., the presence of a candidate may harm his or her alliance. We therefore introduce a new idea of \emph{alliance-aware} voting rules which extend the classical ones. We show that our approach is superior both to using classical cloneproof voting rules and to running primaries within alliances before the election. We introduce several alliance-aware voting rules and show that they satisfy the most desirable standard properties of their classical counterparts as well as newly introduced axioms for the model with alliances which, e.g., exclude the possibility of the spoiler effect. Our rules have natural definitions and are simple enough to explain to be used in practice. |
| Date: | 2024–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2401.16399&r=cdm |
| By: | Momi Dahan |
| Abstract: | This study examines the voting patterns of Mizrahi and Ashkenazi in ten general elections held since the early 2000s in rural and urban areas in Israel, utilizing a new classification method of origin of immigrants and their descendants based on surnames alongside the traditional classification by continent of birth. The study reveals relatively sharp fluctuations across elections in the size of origin gap in voting for right-wing party bloc between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi. According to the empirical analysis, the origin voting gap in the general elections held in 2022 was five times the gap found in the elections held in 2006, and more than twice that of the elections held in 2009. Sharp fluctuations in the voting gap undermine the protest vote hypothesis that discrimination against immigrants of Mizrahi origin in the past is the main factor behind their current political behavior. In all ten elections examined, the gap in voting for the right-wing party bloc between Mizrahi and Ashkenazi voters disappears or decreases considerably when differences in the level of education and degree of religiosity are neutralized. This study also reveals an interesting trend in the political behavior of voters with high education level. They are more likely to vote for the center-left bloc in recent elections, in contrast to their similar support for both blocs recorded in previous elections. |
| Date: | 2023 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_10857&r=cdm |
| By: | Wesley H. Holliday; Alexander Kristoffersen; Eric Pacuit |
| Abstract: | By classic results in social choice theory, any reasonable preferential voting method sometimes gives individuals an incentive to report an insincere preference. The extent to which different voting methods are more or less resistant to such strategic manipulation has become a key consideration for comparing voting methods. Here we measure resistance to manipulation by whether neural networks of varying sizes can learn to profitably manipulate a given voting method in expectation, given different types of limited information about how other voters will vote. We trained nearly 40, 000 neural networks of 26 sizes to manipulate against 8 different voting methods, under 6 types of limited information, in committee-sized elections with 5-21 voters and 3-6 candidates. We find that some voting methods, such as Borda, are highly manipulable by networks with limited information, while others, such as Instant Runoff, are not, despite being quite profitably manipulated by an ideal manipulator with full information. |
| Date: | 2024–01 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2401.16412&r=cdm |
| By: | Hauke Licht (University of Cologne, Cologne Center for Comparative Politics); Ronja Sczepanksi (Sciences Po Paris, Center for European Studies and Comparative Research) |
| Abstract: | Politicians appeal to social groups to court their electoral support. However, quantifying which groups politicians refer to, claim to represent, or address in their public communication presents researchers with challenges. We propose a novel supervised learning approach for extracting group mentions in political texts. We first collect human annotations to determine the exact text passages that refer to social groups. We then fine-tune a Transformer language model for contextualized supervised classification at the word level. Applied to unlabeled texts, our approach enables researchers to automatically detect and extract word spans that contain group mentions. We illustrate our approach in three applications, generating new empirical insights how British parties use social groups in their rhetoric. Our methodological innovation allows to detect and extract mentions of social groups from various sources of texts, creating new possibilities for empirical research in political science. |
| Keywords: | social groups, political rhetoric, computational text analysis, supervised classification |
| JEL: | C45 |
| Date: | 2024–02 |
| URL: | http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ajk:ajkdps:277&r=cdm |