|
on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Romain Lachat (CEVIPOF - Centre de recherches politiques de Sciences Po (Sciences Po, CNRS) - Sciences Po - Sciences Po - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Institut d'Études Politiques [IEP] - Paris); Jean-François Laslier (PSE - Paris School of Economics - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, PJSE - Paris Jourdan Sciences Economiques - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - ENS-PSL - École normale supérieure - Paris - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - EHESS - École des hautes études en sciences sociales - ENPC - École nationale des ponts et chaussées - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement) |
| Abstract: | Declining levels of turnout and growing distrust in political elites are often seen as symptoms of a crisis of representative democracy. Various proposals of reform have been made to reinvigorate representation and political participation. This paper focuses on one aspect of that debate: finding an alternative to FPTP, which is the electoral rule most frequently used in single-member districts, but which is criticized, among others, for allowing only a limited expression of voters' preferences. Many alternative rules are in use or have been suggested, such as Two-Round majority, Instant Runoff, Approval Voting, Majority Judgement, or Range Voting. The literature on these decision rules has concentrated on their formal properties. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how frequently these rules would lead to different outcomes in normal electoral settings. This paper improves our understanding of these rules by examining their mechanical effects. We start from data on voters' party utilities from "real-world" settings, based on CSES data. This allows simulating and comparing the outcomes of different electoral rules under a variety of distributions of voters' party preferences. We then analyze how frequently they lead to different outcomes and identify the contextual characteristics that explain these differences. For the latter question, we focus on a number of party system or electorate's characteristics, which have been highlighted in debates on challenges to representation (such as ideological polarization, party system fragmentation, or affective polarization). |
| Keywords: | Electoral systems, Condorcet winner, Condorcet efficiency, Polarization, Party system fragmentation |
| Date: | 2024–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:pseptp:halshs-04630321 |
| By: | Ethan Kaplan; Jörg 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. |
| Keywords: | ideology, inequality, school desegregation, busing |
| JEL: | H00 P00 J00 N00 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11625 |
| By: | Jo Thori Lind |
| Abstract: | High electoral turnout is seen as a key determinant of a successful democracy. One reason for this is that turnout is believed to affect electoral outcomes. This has given rise to a flourishing literature studying the effect of increased turnout on various outcomes. It is well known that variation in turnout is not random, so a plethora of identification strategies are applied to assure causal estimates. In this paper I argue that this endeavor is futile. I first discuss theoretically how we should define increased turnout. Next, I show that with the various identification strategies, estimates are based on the behavioral response of a biased group of voters. |
| Keywords: | electoral turnout, effect of turnout, composition of electorate, econometric identification |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_11650 |
| By: | Michelle Blom; Alexander Ek; Peter J. Stuckey; Vanessa Teague; Damjan Vukcevic |
| Abstract: | The single transferable vote (STV) is a system of preferential proportional voting employed in multi-seat elections. Each ballot cast by a voter is a (potentially partial) ranking over a set of candidates. The margin of victory, or simply margin, is the smallest number of ballots that, if manipulated (e.g., their rankings changed, or ballots being deleted or added), can alter the set of winners. Knowledge of the margin of an election gives greater insight into both how much time and money should be spent on auditing the election, and whether uncovered mistakes (such as ballot box losses) throw the election result into doubt -- requiring a costly repeat election -- or can be safely ignored. Lower bounds on the margin can also be used for this purpose, in cases where exact margins are difficult to compute. There is one existing approach to computing lower bounds on the margin of STV elections, while there are multiple approaches to finding upper bounds. In this paper, we present improvements to this existing lower bound computation method for STV margins. In many cases the improvements compute tighter (higher) lower bounds as well as making the computation of lower bounds more computationally efficient. For small elections, in conjunction with existing upper bounding approaches, the new algorithms are able to compute exact margins of victory. |
| Date: | 2025–01 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2501.14847 |
| By: | Koetter, Michael; Noth, Felix |
| Abstract: | Lowering carbon intensity in manufacturing is necessary to transform current production technologies. We test if local agents' preferences, revealed by vote shares for the Green party during local elections in Germany, relate to the carbon intensity of investments in production technologies. Our sample comprises all investment choices made by manufacturing establishments from 2005-2017. Our results suggest that ecological preferences correlate with significantly fewer carbon-intensive investment projects while investments stimulating growth and reducing carbon emissions increase by 14 percentage points. Both results are more distinct in federal states where the Green Party enjoys political power and local ecological preferences are high. |
| Keywords: | ecological preferences, elections, establishments' energy usage, investments |
| JEL: | D72 G31 G38 O13 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:iwhdps:310322 |
| By: | Eric Bahel (Department of Economics, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University); Christian Trudeau (Department of Economics, University of Windsor); Haoyu Wang (Department of Economics, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) |
| Abstract: | We introduce the notion of preconvexity, which extends the familiar concept of convexity found in cooperative games with transferable utility. In a convex game, the larger the group joined by an agent, the larger the marginal value brought to the group by that agent. By contrast, in strictly preconvex games, an agent's marginal contribution is initially decreasing (when joining small groups), and it eventually becomes increasing at (and above) some critical group size. As a consequence, the core of a preconvex game may be empty. Defining the property of semicohesiveness (related to marginal contributions at this critical group size), we prove that it is sufficient to guarantee a nonempty core. We also propose a new solution for the set of preconvex games; and we characterize this solution by combining three axioms which are natural in our framework. A stronger cohesiveness property (guaranteeing that our solution falls in the core) is also studied. Some additional results are provided for the special case of anticonvex games, for which marginal contributions are always non-increasing. |
| Keywords: | cooperation; allocation; core; preconvexity; cohesiveness. |
| JEL: | C71 D63 |
| Date: | 2025–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:wis:wpaper:2501 |
| By: | Isabel Melguizo (Department of Economics, CIDE); Sergio Tovar (Department of Economics, CIDE) |
| Abstract: | We study a model in which individuals, that are heterogeneous along a single dimension capturing productivity, choose which of two available groups to join and how much costly effort to exert within their chosen group. On the one hand, individuals like to be in groups in which others' average performance is high (global quality). On the other hand, individuals are concerned with their ranking with respect to their peers' average performance (local standing). Nash equilibrium efforts are such that the higher the individual's productivity the higher her private outcome. In contrast, it is not necessarily the case that highly productive individuals exert more effort. Nash equilibrium efforts are never efficient and whether they are higher or lower than efficient efforts, depends on the strength of global quality versus local standing concerns. Stable partitions of the society into groups may either resemble grouping by productivity or productivity mixing. In contrast, efficient partitions must always exhibit grouping by productivity. |
| Keywords: | peer groups, segregation, mixing, effort choices, welfare |
| JEL: | D61 D60 Z13 |
| Date: | 2025–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:emc:wpaper:dte646 |