The ethics of voting Brennan, Jason
2011., 20120429, 2012, 2011, 2012-04-29, 20110101
eBook
Nothing is more integral to democracy than voting. Most people believe that every citizen has the civic duty or moral obligation to vote, that any sincere vote is morally acceptable, and that buying, ...selling, or trading votes is inherently wrong. In this provocative book, Jason Brennan challenges our fundamental assumptions about voting, revealing why it is not a duty for most citizens--in fact, he argues, many people owe it to the rest of us not to vote.
Voting is a habit. People learn the habit of voting, or not, based on experience in their first few elections. Elections that do not stimulate high turnout among young adults leave a 'footprint' of ...low turnout in the age structure of the electorate as many individuals who were new at those elections fail to vote at subsequent elections. Elections that stimulate high turnout leave a high turnout footprint. So a country's turnout history provides a baseline for current turnout that is largely set, except for young adults. This baseline shifts as older generations leave the electorate and as changes in political and institutional circumstances affect the turnout of new generations. Among the changes that have affected turnout in recent years, the lowering of the voting age in most established democracies has been particularly important in creating a low turnout footprint that has grown with each election.
The Single Transferable Vote, or STV, is often seen in very positive terms by electoral reformers, yet relatively little is known about its actual workings beyond one or two specific settings. This ...book gathers leading experts on STV from around the world to discuss the examples they know best, and represents the first systematic cross-national study of STV. Furthermore, the contributors collectively build an understanding of electoral systems as institutions embedded within a wider social and political context, and begins to explain the gap between analytical models and the actual practice of elections in Australia, Ireland, and Malta. Rather than seeing electoral institutions in purely mechanical terms, the collection of essays in this volume shows that the effects of electoral system may be contingent rather than automatic. On the basis of solid empirical evidence, the volume argues that the same political system can, in fact, have quite different effects under different conditions.
Contributors to the volume are Shaun Bowler, David Farrell, Michael Gallagher, Bernard Grofman, Wolfgang Hirczy, Colin Hughes, J. Paul Johnston, Michael Laver, Malcom Mackerras, Michael Maley, Michael Marsh, Ian McAllister, and Ben Reilly.
Shaun Bowler is Professor of Political Science, University of California, Riverside. Bernard Grofman is Professor of Political Science, University of California, Irvine.
Electronic voting systems face many challenges, including authentication, privacy, data integrity, transparency and verifiability. However, the developed over 10 years ago blockchain technology ...provides an out-of-the-box solution for many of those challenges. Despite that, some issues are still to be solved, like remote authentication, anonymity and end-to-end verifiability. For this reason, research on new and better blockchain-based systems is still ongoing. The main goal of this study is to highlight the current trends in this research and its eventual shortcomings. This was accomplished by conducting a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) (Kitchenham and Charters, 2007), which resulted in selecting 35 publications. The performed SLR allowed to define trends in utilized blockchain technologies, intended scenarios, testing methods, main benefits and challenges faced by various systems and the most used cryptographic solutions.
I assume that voters mark ballots exclusively to express their true preferences among parties, leaving aside any considerations about an election’s possible outcome. The paper then analyzes the ...resulting voting behavior. In particular, it studies how effective different voting systems such as plurality rule, approval voting, and range voting are in fostering high turnout rates of such expressive voters.
This book attempts to redirect the field of voting behavior research by proposing a paradigm-shifting framework for studying voter decision making. An innovative experimental methodology is presented ...for getting 'inside the heads' of citizens as they confront the overwhelming rush of information from modern presidential election campaigns. Four broad theoretically-defined types of decision strategies that voters employ to help decide which candidate to support are described and operationally-defined. Individual and campaign-related factors that lead voters to adopt one or another of these strategies are examined. Most importantly, this research proposes a new normative focus for the scientific study of voting behavior: we should care about not just which candidate received the most votes, but also how many citizens voted correctly - that is, in accordance with their own fully-informed preferences.
This paper studies the introduction of electronic voting technology in Brazilian elections. Estimates exploiting a regression discontinuity design indicate that electronic voting reduced residual ...(error-ridden and uncounted) votes and promoted a large de facto enfranchisement of mainly less educated citizens. Estimates exploiting the unique pattern of the technology's phase-in across states over time suggest that, as predicted by political economy models, it shifted government spending toward health care, which is particularly beneficial to the poor. Positive effects on both the utilization of health services (prenatal visits) and newborn health (low-weight births) are also found for less educated mothers, but not for the more educated.
This book develops and empirically tests a social theory of political participation. It overturns prior understandings of why some people (such as college-degree holders, churchgoers and citizens in ...national rather than local elections) vote more often than others. The book shows that the standard demographic variables are not proxies for variation in the individual costs and benefits of participation, but for systematic variation in the patterns of social ties between potential voters. Potential voters who move in larger social circles, particularly those including politicians and other mobilizing actors, have more access to the flurry of electoral activity prodding citizens to vote and increasing political discussion. Treating voting as a socially defined practice instead of as an individual choice over personal payoffs, a social theory of participation is derived from a mathematical model with behavioral foundations that is empirically calibrated and tested using multiple methods and data sources.
A behavioral theory of elections Bendor, Jonathan; Diermeier, Daniel; Siegel, David A ...
2011., 20110220, 2011, 2011-01-17, 20110101
eBook
Most theories of elections assume that voters and political actors are fully rational. While these formulations produce many insights, they also generate anomalies--most famously, about turnout. The ...rise of behavioral economics has posed new challenges to the premise of rationality. This groundbreaking book provides a behavioral theory of elections based on the notion that all actors--politicians as well as voters--are only boundedly rational. The theory posits learning via trial and error: actions that surpass an actor's aspiration level are more likely to be used in the future, while those that fall short are less likely to be tried later.
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