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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Yifeng Ding; Wesley H. Holliday; Eric Pacuit |
| Abstract: | In the context of voting with ranked ballots, an important class of voting rules is the class of margin-based rules (also called pairwise rules). A voting rule is margin-based if whenever two elections generate the same head-to-head margins of victory or loss between candidates, then the voting rule yields the same outcome in both elections. Although this is a mathematically natural invariance property to consider, whether it should be regarded as a normative axiom on voting rules is less clear. In this paper, we address this question for voting rules with any kind of output, whether a set of candidates, a ranking, a probability distribution, etc. We prove that a voting rule is margin-based if and only if it satisfies some axioms with clearer normative content. A key axiom is what we call Preferential Equality, stating that if two voters both rank a candidate $x$ immediately above a candidate $y$, then either voter switching to rank $y$ immediately above $x$ will have the same effect on the election outcome as if the other voter made the switch, so each voter's preference for $y$ over $x$ is treated equally. |
| Date: | 2025–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2501.08595 |
| By: | Felix Brandt; Chris Dong; Dominik Peters |
| Abstract: | A voting rule is a Condorcet extension if it returns a candidate that beats every other candidate in pairwise majority comparisons whenever one exists. Condorcet extensions have faced criticism due to their susceptibility to variable-electorate paradoxes, especially the reinforcement paradox (Young and Levenglick, 1978) and the no-show paradox (Moulin, 1988). In this paper, we investigate the susceptibility of Condorcet extensions to these paradoxes for the case of exactly three candidates. For the reinforcement paradox, we establish that it must occur for every Condorcet extension when there are at least eight voters and demonstrate that certain refinements of maximin, a voting rule originally proposed by Condorcet (1785), are immune to this paradox when there are at most seven voters. For the no-show paradox, we prove that the only homogeneous Condorcet extensions immune to it are refinements of maximin. We also provide axiomatic characterizations of maximin and two of its refinements, Nanson's rule and leximin, highlighting their suitability for three-candidate elections. |
| Date: | 2024–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2411.19857 |
| By: | Manish Jha |
| Abstract: | This paper demonstrates that hedge funds tend to design their activist campaigns to align with the preferences and ideologies of institutions holding large stakes in the target company. I estimate these preferences by analyzing the institutions' previous proxy voting behavior. The results reveal that activists benefit from this approach. Campaigns with a stronger positive correlation between the preferences of larger institutions and activist communications attract more shareholder attention, receive more votes, and are more likely to succeed. |
| Date: | 2024–11 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2411.16553 |
| By: | Jaume Magre-Pont (Universitat de Barcelona & IEB); Pierre Magontier (Universitat Pompeu Fabra & IEB); Albert Solé-Ollé (Universitat de Barcelona & IEB) |
| Abstract: | To what extent does the incumbent party’s identity shape public policies? We investigate this question by examining national and regional policies in Spain. First, we analyze the evolution of voter preferences and the platforms of the two mainstream parties (PSOE and PP) and of the newer challenger parties that emerged post-financial crisis (Ciudadanos, Podemos, and Vox). We focus on three key national-level issue dimensions: Economic, Social, and Centralization. As expected, the right-wing PP adopts a more conservative stance on all dimensions compared to the left-wing PSOE. However, the policy gap between these two parties remains relatively stable until the mid-2000s, with party platforms tracking the evolution of citizen preferences. After this period, platforms start to diverge, especially in the case of new parties, which display radical stances on these dimensions. We also provide descriptive evidence suggesting that these platform differences have translated into enacted policies. Second, to offer causal evidence on the effect of party identity on policy decisions, we examine partisan disparities in regional fiscal policies. Our findings reveal significant differences in tax policy following the granting of tax autonomy to the regions, somewhat moderated by tax competition and fiscal limits. |
| Keywords: | Political parties; Electoral competition; Fiscal policy |
| JEL: | D72 H70 R52 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ieb:wpaper:doc2024-08 |
| By: | Ethan Kaplan; Jorg L. Spenkuch; Cody Tuttle |
| Abstract: | In 1975, a federal court ordered the desegregation of public schools in Jefferson County, KY. In order to approximately equalize the share of minorities across schools, students were assigned to a busing schedule that depended on the first letter of their last name. We use the resulting quasi-random variation to estimate the long-run impact of attending an inner-city school on political participation and preferences among whites. Drawing on administrative voter registration records and an original survey, we find that being bused to an inner-city school significantly increases support for the Democratic Party and its candidates more than forty years later. Consistent with the idea that exposure to an inner-city environment causes a permanent change in ideological outlook, we also find evidence that bused individuals are much less likely to believe in a "just world" (i.e., that success is earned rather than attributable to luck) and, more tentatively, that they become more supportive of some forms of redistribution. Taken together, our findings point to a poverty-centered version of the contact hypothesis, whereby witnessing economic deprivation durably sensitizes individuals to issues of inequality and fairness. |
| JEL: | D72 H75 I21 I28 J15 N32 |
| Date: | 2025–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:33365 |
| By: | Charroin, Lisa; Vanberg, Christoph |
| Abstract: | We consider a committee facing binary decisions on a number of proposals. If members vote sincerely and payoffs are symmetric in expectation, it can be shown that the simple majority rule is the best q-majority rule in an aggregate or expected payoff sense. We argue that this conclusion changes systematically if the committee faces multiple decisions and members engage in logrolling deals. In a simulation exercise, we find that unanimity rule outperforms majority rule when the number of proposals considered is large enough. We also conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether human subjects engage in logrolling deals and if so which ones. We find that subjects reach some, but not all, of the deals that the experimental situations admit. Deals associated with negative externalities are less likely to arise than others, as are "complex" deals involving many voters or proposals. These results suggest that the impact of logrolling on the relative performance of the decision rules considered may be mitigated by cognitive constraints and other-regarding preferences. |
| Keywords: | logrolling; vote trading; majority rule; unanimity rule; experiment |
| Date: | 2025–01–21 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:awi:wpaper:0758 |
| By: | Teguh Dartanto; Yoshua Caesar Justinus; Rus'an Nasrudin (Institute for Economic and Social Research, Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Indonesia (LPEM FEB UI)) |
| Abstract: | COVID-19, as an infectious disease, increases health risks and may potentially reduce political participation in general elections. Nevertheless, existing empirical research has yielded inconclusive results. This study aims to estimate the impact of COVID-19 on political participation in the 2020 Regional Elections in Indonesia. Applying the Difference-in-Differences (DiD) method, Propensity Score Matching (PSM)-DiD, and First-Difference regression on panel data spanning 2015 and 2020, our investigation revealed significant insights. Firstly, we observed a strong negative correlation between COVID-19 and voter turnout, particularly in regions with increased COVID-19 cases witnessing reduced turnout. However, we did not find robust evidence to support a causal link between COVID-19 and decreased voter turnout. Secondly, the surge in turnout during the 2020 regional elections seems attributable to a time-related trend. Thirdly, voter turnout positively correlates with regions featuring two or more competing candidates. Our study confirms that health risks do not necessarily deter political participation in Indonesia. The relatively lower awareness of health risks among the Indonesian population could influence the country’s approach to managing COVID-19 and the future potential disease outbreak. |
| Keywords: | COVID-19 — health risk — local election — turnout — Indonesia |
| JEL: | D72 I18 |
| Date: | 2024 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:lpe:wpaper:202477 |
| By: | Volckart, Oliver |
| Abstract: | Scholars agree that a core feature of the political style of the Holy Roman Empire was the focus on consensus, without which policy-making at the level of the Empire would have been impossible. This article demonstrates that the consensus on which decisions of the imperial estates was based tended to be superficial and was often in danger of breaking down. This vulnerability was a product of the diet’s open and sequential voting procedure, which allowed the bandwagon effect to distort outcomes. An analysis of the votes cast in the princes’ college at the diet of 1555 shows that low-status members of the college regularly imitated the decisions of high-status voters. Reforming the system would have required accepting that the members of the college were equals—an idea no one was prepared to countenance. Hence, superficial and transitory agreements remained a systematic feature of politics at the level of the Empire. |
| Keywords: | bandwagon effect; voting; early modern parliamentarism; Holy Roman Empire |
| JEL: | N43 H11 |
| Date: | 2023–03–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ehl:lserod:112798 |