The Delegate Paradox Ahler, Douglas J.; Broockman, David E.
The Journal of politics,
10/2018, Letnik:
80, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Many advocate for political reforms intended to resolve apparent disjunctures between politicians’ ideologically polarized policy positions and citizens’ less polarized policy preferences. We show ...these apparent disjunctures can arise even when politicians represent their constituencies well and that resolving them would likely degrade representation. These counterintuitive results arise from a paradox whereby polarized politicians can best represent constituencies composed of citizens with idiosyncratic preferences. We document this paradox among US House members, often criticized for excessive polarization. We show that if House members represented their constituencies’ preferences as closely as possible, they would still appear polarized. Moreover, current members nearly always represent their constituencies better than counterfactual less polarized members. A series of experiments confirms that even “moderate” citizens usually prefer ostensibly polarized representatives to many less polarized alternatives.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Party stereotyping inflames polarization. What fuels party stereotyping? We explore the extent to which a common mental shortcut—the representativeness heuristic—yields biased mental images of the ...parties. First, we show that people commit the conjunction fallacy—a logical error associated with representativeness bias—at higher rates when evaluating others with party-representative characteristics. Second, when we inform people of the percentage of partisans in groups, the least numerate use this information to infer party composition, consistent with the representativeness heuristic. Finally, we show that people’s party stereotypes become more biased when we increase cognitive load, though stereotyping occurs even in relatively “easy” contexts. The representativeness heuristic appears to exacerbate party stereotyping, and the way that media informs people about the relationship between social groups and parties may encourage reliance on representativeness. More broadly, reducing stereotyping requires reckoning with our built-in machinery for simplifying the world around us.
In current robotics research there is a vast body of work on algorithms and control methods for groups of decentralized cooperating robots, called a swarm or collective. These algorithms are ...generally meant to control collectives of hundreds or even thousands of robots; however, for reasons of cost, time, or complexity, they are generally validated in simulation only, or on a group of a few tens of robots. To address this issue, this paper presents Kilobot, an open-source, low cost robot designed to make testing collective algorithms on hundreds or thousands of robots accessible to robotics researchers. To enable the possibility of large Kilobot collectives where the number of robots is an order of magnitude larger than the largest that exist today, each robot is made with only $14 worth of parts and takes 5 min to assemble. Furthermore, the robot design allows a single user to easily operate a large Kilobot collective, such as programming, powering on, and charging all robots, which would be difficult or impossible to do with many existing robotic systems. We demonstrate the capabilities of the Kilobot as a collective robot, by using a small robot test collective to implement four popular swarm behaviors: foraging, formation control, phototaxis, and synchronization.
•Present design of Kilobot, a low cost robot for testing collective algorithms on large groups.•Easy to use with a single user.•Demonstrations of collective algorithms on up to 100 robots.
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