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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Hövermann, Andreas; Kohlrausch, Bettina; Langer, Arnim; Meuleman, Bart |
| Abstract: | In the face of the 2024 European Parliament elections, the study at hand investigates the role of work, working conditions, and workers' voice for (anti-)democratic attitudes and far-right voting intentions. For this purpose, primary survey data was collected among the labour force in ten EU countries (N=15, 000). While in all countries, far-right populists obtain sizeable shares of the voting intentions in the data, the majority of respondents in all countries neither intend to vote right-wing nor have voted right-wing in the past and consider the principle of democracy as very important. The world of work is highly relevant when it comes to understanding and combating the rise of the political far right. This study finds consistent and strong evidence that good working conditions and workers' voice provide a buffer against anti-democratic attitudes. Furthermore, concerns about transformations of the labour market play a crucial role for the attitudes towards democracy. Yet, there is no straightforward link with far-right voting intentions: The extent to which democratic attitudes translate into corresponding voting preferences depends on the supply side of the respective party system and the political climate of the country in question. The study closes with proposed instruments towards a fairer and more democratic labour market across the EU. |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:wsistu:308840 |
| By: | Kistinger, Dorothea (Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC)); Kögel, Noah (Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC)); Koch, Nicolas (Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC)); Kalkuhl, Matthias (Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC)) |
| Abstract: | The transition to a renewable heating system poses extraordinary policy challenges to societies in Europe and beyond. Many buildings are heated decentrally, which makes broad public acceptance essential. As governments may be held responsible for perceived policy impacts on individuals, analyzing their effects on electoral support is of high relevance. This study examines the electoral impact of an amendment to the German Buildings Energy Act which proposed a phase-out of fossil-fueled heating systems. We combine municipal election data with granular socioeconomic and building stock data and apply difference-in-differences regressions to identify treatment effects of the policy amendment on electoral support. We find that material costs of the policy, proxied by the characteristics of the local building stock, led to relative gains for the right-wing populist party, further increasing in low-income areas. These findings highlight the importance of holistic climate policy approaches that account for heterogeneous burdens and counteract a political backlash through compensation policies. |
| Keywords: | climate policy, public acceptance, voting, building sector, difference-in-differences |
| JEL: | C21 D72 Q48 Q58 |
| Date: | 2025–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:iza:izadps:dp17596 |
| By: | Rene van den Brink (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Tinbergen Institute); Dinko Dimitrov (Saarland University); Agnieszka Rusinowska (Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne, CNRS) |
| Abstract: | Simple games in partition function form are used to model voting situations where a coalition being winning or losing might depend on the way players outside that coalition organize themselves. Such a game is called a plurality voting game if in every partition there is at least one winning coalition. In the present paper, we introduce a power index for this class of voting games and provide an axiomatic characterization. This power index is based on equal weight for every partition, equal weight for every winning coalition in a partition, and equal weight for each player in a winning coalition. Since some of the axioms we develop are conditioned on the power impact of losing coalitions becoming winning in a partition, our characterization heavily depends on a new result showing the existence of such elementary transitions between plurality voting games in terms of single embedded winning coalitions. The axioms restrict then the impact of such elementary transitions on the power of different types of players. |
| Keywords: | axiomatization; power index; plurality game; winning coalition |
| JEL: | C71 D62 D72 |
| Date: | 2024–12–20 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tin:wpaper:20240076 |
| By: | Yaroslav Rosokha; Xinxin Lyu; Denis Tverskoi; Sergey Gavrilets |
| Abstract: | We study cooperation among individuals and groups facing a dynamic social dilemma in which the benefits of cooperation are divided according to political power obtained in a contest. The main theoretical and experimental results focus on the role of the incumbency advantage. Specifically, an incumbency advantage in the political contest leads to a rapid breakdown of cooperation in the social dilemma. In addition, we investigate whether groups behave differently than individuals and provide simulations based on the individual evolutionary learning model of Arifovic and Ledyard (2012) to shed light on the difference observed in the experiment. |
| Keywords: | Dynamic Games, Cooperation, Coordination, Contest, Experiments, Group Decision Making |
| JEL: | C73 C92 D91 |
| Date: | 2024–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pur:prukra:1350 |
| By: | Yaroslav Rosokha; Xinxin Lyu; Denis Tverskoi; Sergey Gavrilets |
| Abstract: | We theoretically and experimentally study an indefinite dynamic game intended to capture two main aspects of the political process – elections in which opposing factions compete by spending resources and policy-making in which those same factions are required to cooperate for the successful legislature. The main theoretical result is that limits on spending in the election contest increase cooperation. On the experimental side, we first test and confirm theoretical predictions and then explore whether such limits could arise endogenously. We find that a majority of subjects are successful in establishing a consensus on low limits, leading to higher cooperation and welfare. |
| Keywords: | Political Economy, Endogenous Institutions, Dynamic Games, Cooperation, Coordination, Contest, Experiments |
| JEL: | C73 C92 D91 |
| Date: | 2024–07 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:pur:prukra:1352 |
| By: | Haris Aziz; Patrick Lederer; Xinhang Lu; Mashbat Suzuki; Jeremy Vollen |
| Abstract: | In approval-based budget division, a budget needs to be distributed to some candidates based on the voters' approval ballots over these candidates. In the pursuit of simple, well-behaved, and approximately fair rules for this setting, we introduce the class of sequential payment rules, where each voter controls a part of the budget and repeatedly spends his share on his approved candidates to determine the final distribution. We show that all sequential payment rules satisfy a demanding population consistency notion and we identify two particularly appealing rules within this class called the maximum payment rule (MP) and the $\frac{1}{3}$-multiplicative sequential payment rule ($\frac{1}{3}$-MP). More specifically, we prove that (i) MP is, apart from one other rule, the only monotonic sequential payment rule and gives a $2$-approximation to a fairness notion called average fair share, and (ii) $\frac{1}{3}$-MP gives a $\frac{3}{2}$-approximation to average fair share, which is optimal among sequential payment rules. |
| Date: | 2024–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2412.02435 |
| By: | Alexander Ek; Michelle Blom; Philip B. Stark; Peter J. Stuckey; Damjan Vukcevic |
| Abstract: | AWAIRE is one of two extant methods for conducting risk limiting audits of instant-runoff voting (IRV) elections. In principle AWAIRE can audit IRV contests with any number of candidates, but the original implementation incurred memory and computation costs that grew super exponentially with the number of candidates. This paper improves the algorithmic implementation of AWAIRE in three ways that make it practical to audit IRV contests with 55 candidates, compared to the previous 6 candidates. First, rather than trying from the start to rule out all candidate elimination orders that produce a different winner, the algorithm starts by considering only the final round, testing statistically whether each candidate could have won that round. For those candidates who cannot be ruled out at that stage, it expands to consider earlier and earlier rounds until either it provides strong evidence that the reported winner really won or a full hand count is conducted, revealing who really won. Second, it tests a richer collection of conditions, some of which can rule out many elimination orders at once. Third, it exploits relationships among those conditions, allowing it to abandon testing those that are unlikely to help. We provide real-world examples with up to 36 candidates and synthetic examples with up to 55 candidates, showing how audit sample size depends on the margins and on the tuning parameters. An open-source Python implementation is publicly available. |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:msh:ebswps:2024-15 |
| By: | Stefano Carattini; Anomitro Chatterjee; Todd Cherry |
| Abstract: | Biased beliefs affect real-world decisions, including political solutions to societal challenges. One crucial example is environmental policy: people tend to underestimate the incentive effect of Pigouvian policies. Addressing biased beliefs at scale is then paramount. In the days leading up to a ballot initiative in Washington state, we implemented a large-scale field experiment providing information on carbon taxes to over 285, 000 individuals. We complemented it with a survey experiment of about 1, 000 individuals, with the same treatments as in the field experiment, shedding light on social desirability bias and mechanisms around belief revision. Using data at the voting precinct level, we show that our intervention increases revealed support for carbon taxes, mainly for a treatment centered around earmarking of tax revenue, which was one of the design features of the ballot initiative. We find the effect to be stronger in precincts relatively opposed to the initiative, and less exposed to media coverage of carbon taxes, and more exposed to coverage challenging their effectiveness. |
| Keywords: | carbon taxes, voting behaviour, Facebook ads, natural field experiment |
| JEL: | C93 D72 D82 D83 H23 Q54 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11599 |
| By: | Felix Brandt; Patrick Lederer |
| Abstract: | An important -- but very demanding -- property in collective decision-making is strategyproofness, which requires that voters cannot benefit from submitting insincere preferences. Gibbard (1977) has shown that only rather unattractive rules are strategyproof, even when allowing for randomization. However, Gibbard's theorem is based on a rather strong interpretation of strategyproofness, which deems a manipulation successful if it increases the voter's expected utility for at least one utility function consistent with his ordinal preferences. In this paper, we study weak strategyproofness, which deems a manipulation successful if it increases the voter's expected utility for all utility functions consistent with his ordinal preferences. We show how to systematically design attractive, weakly strategyproof social decision schemes (SDSs) and explore their limitations for both strict and weak preferences. In particular, for strict preferences, we show that there are weakly strategyproof SDSs that are either ex post efficient or Condorcet-consistent, while neither even-chance SDSs nor pairwise SDSs satisfy both properties and weak strategyproofness at the same time. By contrast, for the case of weak preferences, we discuss two sweeping impossibility results that preclude the existence of appealing weakly strategyproof SDSs. |
| Date: | 2024–12 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2412.11977 |