This book integrates spatial and behavioral perspectives - in a word, those of the Rochester and Michigan schools - into a unified theory of voter choice and party strategy. The theory encompasses ...both policy and non-policy factors, effects of turnout, voter discounting of party promises, expectations of coalition governments, and party motivations based on policy as well as office. Optimal (Nash equilibrium) strategies are determined for alternative models for presidential elections in the US and France, and for parliamentary elections in Britain and Norway. These polities cover a wide range of electoral rules, number of major parties, and governmental structures. The analyses suggest that the more competitive parties generally take policy positions that come close to maximizing their electoral support, and that these vote-maximizing positions correlate strongly with the mean policy positions of their supporters.
Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods have facilitated an explosion of interest in Bayesian methods. MCMC is an incredibly useful and important tool but can face difficulties when used to estimate ...complex posteriors or models applied to large data sets. In this paper, we show how a recently developed tool in computer science for fitting Bayesian models, variational approximations, can be used to facilitate the application of Bayesian models to political science data. Variational approximations are often much faster than MCMC for fully Bayesian inference and in some instances facilitate the estimation of models that would be otherwise impossible to estimate. As a deterministic posterior approximation method, variational approximations are guaranteed to converge and convergence is easily assessed. But variational approximations do have some limitations, which we detail below. Therefore, variational approximations are best suited to problems when fully Bayesian inference would otherwise be impossible. Through a series of examples, we demonstrate how variational approximations are useful for a variety of political science research. This includes models to describe legislative voting blocs and statistical models for political texts. The code that implements the models in this paper is available in the supplementary material.
This report documents the Federal Voting Assistance Program’s efforts to align its strategy and operations to better serve its mission and stakeholders, and strengthen its capacity to set its own ...course, greet change, and communicate its role in the voting community. The report shows the potential for substantial, timely change in a highly collaborative working relationship, rooted in a systematic and analytically grounded research design.
Voting advice applications (VAAs) are online tools that provide voters with personalized information on the extent to which their policy views match those of political parties or candidates. These ...tools have proliferated across advanced democracies in recent years and become integral parts of electoral campaigns, especially in multi-party systems. However, it remains unclear to what extent voters actually make use of VAAs to inform their voting preferences. We present new field-experimental evidence on the short-term effects of VAAs on party preferences from five European countries. We find consistent evidence that exposure to VAA advice leads voters to update their party preferences in line with the information provided. Furthermore, we find partial evidence that VAAs more strongly influence less politically interested and undecided voters. Overall, our results point to the potential value of VAAs as a mechanism to strengthen democratic representation and accountability.
Does social protest following the police killing of unarmed Black civilians have a widespread “opinion-mobilizing” effect against the police? Or, does the racialized nature of these events polarize ...mass opinion based on standing racial and political orientations? To answer these questions, we use a large dataset comprised of weekly cross sections of the American public and employ a regression discontinuity in time (RDiT) approach leveraging the random timing of the police killing of George Floyd and ensuing nationwide protests. We find that the Floyd protests swiftly decreased favorability toward the police and increased perceived anti-Black discrimination among low-prejudice and politically liberal Americans. However, attitudes among high-prejudice and politically conservative Americans either remained unchanged or evinced only small and ephemeral shifts. Our evidence suggests that the Floyd protests served to further racialize and politicize attitudes within the domain of race and law enforcement in the U.S.
We report the results of a randomized field experiment involving approximately 30,000 registered voters in New Haven, Connecticut. Nonpartisan get-out-the-vote messages were conveyed through personal ...canvassing, direct mail, and telephone calls shortly before the November 1998 election. A variety of substantive messages were used. Voter turnout was increased substantially by personal canvassing, slightly by direct mail, and not at all by telephone calls. These findings support our hypothesis that the long-term retrenchment in voter turnout is partly attributable to the decline in face-to-face political mobilization.
Political theorists have argued that democracies should strive for high turnout, leading to an argument for the introduction of compulsory voting, one of the surest ways to increase turnout. Others ...have warned that this obligation comes at a cost of lower quality votes. We investigate these claims by examining the impact of compulsory voting on proximity voting. First, we examine individuals’voting behavior in three countries with strong compulsory voting laws: Australia, Belgium and Brazil. Election surveys in these countries include a hypothetical question about the likelihood of voting without legal obligation. We continue with an examination of the effects of compulsory voting in Switzerland, which varies across cantons. Our results support the ‘reluctant voter’ hypothesis: Compelling voters to vote tends to weaken the impact of proximity considerations on electoral behaviour, although this effect remains limited and is only significant in half of the elections that were investigated.
The mean majority deficit in a two-tier voting system is a function of the partition of the population. We derive a new square-root rule: For odd-numbered population sizes and equipopulous units the ...mean majority deficit is maximal when the member size of the units in the partition is close to the square root of the population size. Furthermore, within the partitions into roughly equipopulous units, partitions with small even numbers of units or small even-sized units yield high mean majority deficits. We discuss the implications for the winner-takes-all system in the US Electoral College.
•We model a two-party dynamic voting model with heterogeneous voters.•Voters’ preferences endogenously evolve over time and parties are policy motivated.•Model’s outcomes include convergence, ...instability, and extreme equilibria.•Convergence is achieved when neither party has enough support to pursue its agenda.
We test whether the original median voter theorem’s result of political convergence in a two-party system holds when the control variables that influence voters’ preferences endogenously evolve over time and parties are policy motivated. We present a dynamic voting model in which voters’ heterogeneous preferences evolve over time depending on observable common factors and unobservable idiosyncratic characteristics. In such a setting, the convergence of parties’ platforms to the centre is a special case within a range of results that include instability and extreme equilibria. In particular, convergence is achieved not as the result of electoral strategies, but when neither party has enough support to pursue its agenda.
Negotiable Votes Grandi, Umberto; Grossi, Davide; Turrini, Paolo
The Journal of artificial intelligence research,
04/2019, Letnik:
64
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
We study voting games on binary issues, where voters hold an objective over the outcome of the collective decision and are allowed, before the vote takes place, to negotiate their ballots with the ...other participants. We analyse the voters' rational behaviour in the resulting two-phase game when ballots are aggregated via non-manipulable rules and, more specifically, quota rules. We show under what conditions undesirable equilibria can be removed and desirable ones sustained as a consequence of the pre-vote phase.
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