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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Luca Braghieri; Leonardo Bursztyn; Jan Fasnacht |
| Abstract: | Voting-based collective decisions are typically made either anonymously or publicly. Anonymous voting protects truthful expression but conceals individual behavior; public voting provides information about individual votes, but, when one option is socially stigmatized, it can distort participation and choices. We introduce threshold majority voting, in which voters choose a disclosure threshold determining whether and when their votes are revealed. In an experiment at UC Berkeley on the participation of transgender women in women’s sports, public voting nearly doubles abstention and reduces support for the stigmatized option. Threshold voting eliminates these distortions while revealing one-third of individual votes. |
| JEL: | C93 D72 D82 |
| Date: | 2026–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:nbr:nberwo:34827 |
| By: | Gratton, Gabriele; Lee, Barton E. |
| Abstract: | We study a model of popular demand for anti-elite populist reforms that drain the swamp: replace experienced public servants with novices that will only acquire experience with time. Voters benefit from experienced public servants because they are more effective at delivering public goods and more competent at detecting emergency threats. However, public servants' policy preferences do not always align with those of voters. This tradeoff produces two key forces in our model: public servants' incompetence spurs disagreement between them and voters, and their effectiveness grants them more power to dictate policy. Both of these effects fuel mistrust between voters and public servants, sometimes inducing voters to drain the swamp in cycles of anti-elite populism. We study which factors can sustain a responsive democracy or induce a technocracy. When instead populism arises, we discuss which reforms may reduce the frequency of populist cycles, including recruiting of public servants and isolating them from politics. Our results support the view that a more inclusive and representative bureaucracy protects against anti-elite populism. We provide empirical evidence that lack of trust in public servants is a key force behind support for anti-elite populist parties and argue that our model helps explain the rise of anti-elite populism in large robust democracies. |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:cbscwp:336736 |
| By: | Montagnes, B. Pablo; Peskowitz, Zachary; Sridharan, Suhas A. |
| Abstract: | Asset managers face increasing political risk stemming from concerns that they prioritize their own interests when voting on behalf of investors. Using survey evidence and structural estimation, we provide early evidence on how well asset managers represent their investors by studying the ideological alignment between the two in the initial implementation of "voting choice policies." These policies allow investors in mutual funds and ETFs a limited menu of options to express their preferences on how fund managers vote their shares in corporate proxy contests. We conduct an original survey to measure investors' preferences on management and shareholder proposals and assess how well voting choice policies agree with these preferences. Using this survey data, we structurally estimate the ideological locations of investors and compare them to those of the voting choice policies. Our structural estimation includes ideological weighting to account for variation in relative importance of different ESG topics. We find that voting choice policies are clustered in the first and third dimensions of the ideological space. These correspond to left-right preferences and the willingness to implement socially conservative restrictions on the agency of the firm's managers. The addition of a simple new voting choice policy, which supports the positions of a majority of survey respondents, can increase investor-policy alignment. |
| JEL: | M40 M41 M48 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:cbscwp:336738 |
| By: | Vasiliki Fouka; Theo Serlin |
| Abstract: | When do people identify with their class? Evidence from social psychology shows that individuals are more likely to identify with a group if they are similar to its members. We study early 20th century Britain and show that regional cultural heterogeneity combined with internal migration influenced class identity. We develop and validate a measure of class identity using naming decisions. Exploiting within-household variation, we show that migration patterns that increased the local share of culturally-distant workers reduced working class identification. Where migration increased the cultural distance of the working class, workers were less likely to join unions, voters were less likely to support the nascent Labour Party, and parliamentary candidates were less likely to target working class voters. By 1911, slower in-migration and rising local population growth reduced working class distance in urban areas, which also became strongholds of support for Labour. Migration alters social identity and creates political cleavages. |
| Keywords: | migration, identity, class |
| JEL: | D72 J61 N33 Z10 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12419 |
| By: | David McCune; Jennifer Wilson |
| Abstract: | We analyze how frequently instant runoff voting (IRV) selects the weakest (or least popular) candidate in three-candidate elections. We consider four definitions of ``weakest candidate'': the Borda loser, the Bucklin loser, the candidate with the most last-place votes, and the candidate with minimum social utility. We determine the probability that IRV selects the weakest candidate under the impartial anonymous culture and impartial culture models of voter behavior, and use Monte Carlo simulations to estimate these probabilities under several spatial models. We also examine this question empirically using a large dataset of real elections. Our results show that IRV can select the weakest candidates under each of these definitions, but such outcomes are generally rare. Across most models, the probability that IRV elects a given type of weakest candidate is at most 5\%. Larger probabilities arise only when the electorate is extremely polarized. |
| Date: | 2026–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2602.21504 |
| By: | Moon Duchin; Kristopher Tapp |
| Abstract: | In this paper, we develop the metric geometry of ranking statistics, proving that the two major permutation distances in the statistics literature -- Kendall tau and Spearman footrule -- extend naturally to incomplete rankings with both coordinate embeddings and graph realizations. This gives us a unifying framework that allows us to connect popular topics in computational social choice: metric preferences (and metric distortion), polarization, and proportionality. As an important application, the metric structure enables efficient identification of blocs of voters and slates of their preferred candidates. Since the definitions work for partial ballots, we can execute the methods not only on synthetic elections, but on a suite of real-world elections. This gives us robust clustering methods that often produce an identical grouping of voters -- even though one family of methods is based on a Condorcet-consistent ranking rule while the other is not. |
| Date: | 2026–02 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:arx:papers:2602.10293 |
| By: | Rosello, Giulia; Reatini, Maria Antonietta; Pinto, Gabriele; Cattani, Giorgio |
| Abstract: | Air pollution is a major externality whose consequences extend beyond health and productivity. This paper shows that short-run pollution shocks also reduce democratic participation. We combine official, municipality-level election results from 32 national, European, regional, and municipal elections in Italy (2013-2022) with newly assembled daily measures of PM2.5, PM10, and NO2 for all Italian municipalities. Our identification strategy exploits quasi-random election-day deviations in local pollution relative to recent conditions, and we corroborate the results using wind speed as an instrument for particulate matter. Higher pollution on election day substantially depresses turnout: a 10 μg/m3 increase in PM2.5 (roughly doubling typical exposure) lowers participation by 2-3 percentage points, corresponding to about one million fewer votes. The estimates are similar for PM10 and NO2, and when pollution exceeds WHO guideline thresholds. Using post-election survey data from the 2013, 2018, and 2022 national elections coupled with survey-date exposure, we find consistent individual-level declines in reported voting intentions, with larger effects among citizens who report higher political interest. These findings identify the political-economy cost of air pollution, which not only reduces turnout but distorts the democratic representation by altering who turns out, not just how many. Our results suggest that environmental regulation can strengthen the democratic process by improving political participation and representation, in addition to its health and welfare benefits. |
| Keywords: | Air Pollution, Turnout, Environmental Effects, Political Participation |
| JEL: | Q51 Q53 D72 D91 O44 |
| Date: | 2026–02–24 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:unm:unumer:2026004 |
| By: | Fisman, Raymond; Leder-Luis, Jetson; O'Donnell, Catherine; Vannutelli, Silvia |
| Abstract: | Revolving door laws restrict public officials from representing private interests before government after leaving office. While these laws mitigate potential conflicts of interest, they also may affect the pool of candidates for public positions by lowering the financial benefits of holding office. We study the consequences of revolving door laws for political selection in U.S. state legislatures, exploiting the staggered roll-out of laws across states over time. We find that fewer new candidates enter politics in treated states and that incumbent legislators are less likely to leave office, leading to an increase in uncontested elections. The decline in entry is particularly strong for independent and more moderate candidates, which may increase polarization. We provide a model of politician career incentives to interpret the results. |
| JEL: | D72 D73 K16 |
| Date: | 2025 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:cbscwp:336735 |