More on independent decisiveness and Arrow's theorem

Denicolò [2, Theorem 1] strengthens Arrow's [1, p. 97] theorem by replacing the independence of irrelevant alternatives (IIA) condition by a strictly weaker one, relational independent decisiveness (RID). It is shown here that RID can be still substantially weakened. Yet, the new condition is equivalent to RID under the weak Pareto principle P and unrestricted domain U. In fact, any condition that can be put in place of IIA in Arrow's theorem must imply RID in the presence of P and U. Incidentally, it is argued that Denicolò's proof of his Theorem 1 contains an imprecision. Received: 7 March 2000/Accepted: 11 December 2000     

Majority voting rules and the union success rate in national labor relations board representation elections

This paper simulates how the union success rate in representation elections would be affected if the NLRB reverted from its current simple-majority voting rule to its original majority-in-unit voting rule. Such a rule change would have altered 21 percent of decertification and 16 percent of certification victories over the period 1977–81, resulting in the loss of 180,400 actual or potential bargaining unit members for the union movement. Abstentions play an important role in election outcomes. Under the present voting rule unions have no clear advantage to “get out the vote” in decertification elections, but a clear disadvantage in certification elections. Under a majority-in-unit rule unions hold an advantage when they “get out the vote” in all representation elections. I would like to thank Mike Bognanno, Jim Dworkin, Paul Schumann, two reviewers, and the editor for helpful comments and David Wilson for excellent research assistance. I would also like to thank the NLRB for providing the election data tape.     

Going from theory to practice: the mixed success of approval voting

Approval voting (AV) is a voting system in which voters can vote for, or approve of, as many candidates as they like in multicandidate elections. In 1987 and 1988, four scientific and engineering societies, collectively comprising several hundred thousand members, used AV for the first time. Since then, about half a dozen other societies have adopted AV. Usually its adoption was seriously debated, but other times pragmatic or political considerations proved decisive in its selection. While AV has an ancient pedigree, its recent history is the focus of this paper. Ballot data from some of the societies that adopted AV are used to compare theoretical results with experience, including the nature of voting under AV and the kinds of candidates that are elected. Although the use of AV is generally considered to have been successful in the societies—living up to the rhetoric of its proponents—AV has been a controversial reform. AV is not currently used in any public elections, despite efforts to institute it, so its success should be judged as mixed. The chief reason for its nonadoption in public elections, and by some societies, seems to be a lack of key “insider” support.     

More than just trees: Assessing reforestation success in tropical developing countries

Rural communities in many parts of the tropics are dependent of forests for their livelihoods and for environmental services. Forest resources in the tropics have declined rapidly over the past century and therefore many developing countries in the tropics have reforestation programs. Although reforestation is a long-term process with long-term benefits, existing evaluations of the success of these programs tends to focus on short-term establishment success indicators. This paper presents a review of reforestation assessment that highlights the need to not only consider short-term establishment success, but also longer-term growth and maturation success, environmental success and socio-economic success. In addition, we argue that reforestation assessment should not be based on success indicators alone, but should incorporate the drivers of success, which encompasses an array of biophysical, socio-economic, institutional and project characteristics. This is needed in order to understand the reasons why reforestation projects succeed or fail and therefore to design more successful projects in future. The paper presents a conceptual model for reforestation success assessment that links key groups of success indicators and drivers. This conceptual model provides the basis for a more comprehensive evaluation of reforestation success and the basis for the development of predictive systems-based assessment models. These models will be needed to better guide reforestation project planning and policy design and therefore assist rural communities in tropical developing countries to alleviate poverty and achieve a better quality of life.     

Fairness and voting

In this paper we present a two-period model in which we examine how concern about fairness might affect voter behavior. We show that in the first period politicians choose the median voter’s position even if this does not correspond to their bliss points and neither they nor the voters can commit to a particular action. Moreover, concern about fairness creates substantial incumbency advantages. Our results hold even if voters care very little about fairness.     

Strategic voting and nomination

Using computer simulations based on three separate data generating processes, I estimate the fraction of elections in which sincere voting is a core equilibrium given each of eight single-winner voting rules. Additionally, I determine how often each rule is vulnerable to simple voting strategies such as ‘burying’ and ‘compromising’, and how often each rule gives an incentive for non-winning candidates to enter or leave races. I find that Hare is least vulnerable to strategic voting in general, whereas Borda, Coombs, approval, and range are most vulnerable. I find that plurality is most vulnerable to compromising and strategic exit (causing an unusually strong tendency toward two-party systems), and that Borda is most vulnerable to strategic entry. I use analytical proofs to provide further intuition for some of my key results.     

Inequality in voting power

This paper deals with the assessment of inequality in the distribution of voting power. Voting power is evaluated through a general concept of power measurement based on both the voting rule and the probability distribution over vote configurations. This general concept includes as particular cases the most usual power indices and other extensions of this traditional concept. Thus no particular power index is privileged in our approach. An inequality index over the class of all power profiles with a given number of voters generated by this general measure is then singled out by requiring reasonable properties. In order to compare profiles with different numbers of voters, two alternative principles are considered, which extend the said index consistently in two ways.Previous versions of this work were circulated under different titles. We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología under the Ramón y Cajal programme and under projects PB96-0247 and BEC2000-0875; from the European Commission under the Training and Mobility of Researchers programme (contract FMRX - CT966-0055); and from the Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas. We also thank two anonymous referees for their comments.2 October 2001     

Approval voting and positional voting methods: Inference,relationship, examples

Approval voting is the voting method recently adopted by the Society for Social Choice and Welfare. Positional voting methods include the famous plurality, antiplurality, and Borda methods. We extend the inference framework of Tsetlin and Regenwetter (2003) from majority rule to approval voting and all positional voting methods. We also establish a link between approval voting and positional voting methods whenever Falmagne et al.s (1996) size-independent model of approval voting holds: In all such cases, approval voting mimics some positional voting method. We illustrate our inference framework by analyzing approval voting and ranking data, with and without the assumption of the size-independent model. For many of the existing data, including the Society for Social Choice and Welfare election analyzed by Brams and Fishburn (2001) and Saari (2001), low turnout implies that inferences drawn from such elections carry low (statistical) confidence. Whenever solid inferences are possible, we find that, under certain statistical assumptions, approval voting tends to agree with positional voting methods, and with Borda, in particular.Michel Regenwetter thanks the National Science Foundation for funding this research through NSF grant SBR 97-30076. Both authors thank the Fuqua School of Business for financially supporting their collaboration. Most of this research was done while Regenwetter was a faculty member at Fuqua. We thank Prof. Steven Brams for his valuable comments as a discussant of a previous version of this paper, given at the 2002 Public Choice meeting, and Prof. Donald Saari for his helpful comments in conversations and on another draft. We also thank the editor in charge and a referee for their valuable comments. Tsetlin acknowledges the support of the Centre for Decision Making and Risk Analysis at INSEAD.     

Class voting and class consciousness in Canada

Plusieurs hypotheses existent, qui tentent d'expliquer la faiblesse du vote de classe au Canada. Je tente ici de reformuler certaines de ces hypothPses, i partir de leurs postulats i1'6gard de la conscience de classe et de la formation de classe. Deux types d'explications sont identifies: celles, d'abord, qui soutiennent que le bas niveau de conscience de classe au Canada est la cause de I'absence de formation de classe; et celles pour qui l'inverse est vrai. Toutes les hypotheses considerees trouvent des donnees qui les supportent dans la ricente Etude electorale nationale. I1 est actuellement impossible de choisir entre elles, alors que les donnees disponibles ont une valeur limitee et que des problemes de niveaux d'analyse restent i resoudre. On devrait considerer les deux modes d'explication comme interactifs, et aussi vraisemblables l'un que l'autre.
Many hypotheses have been advanced to explain the low levels of class voting in Canada. This article reformulates a number of these in terms of their assumptions about class consciousness and class formation. Explanations are divided into those which hold the society's low level of class consciousness responsible for the lack of class formation, and those which propose the reverse. Evidence from recent National Elections Study data contains support for all of the hypotheses, and it is concluded that choosing between them is currently impossible because of data limitations and level-of-analysis problems. The two lines of argument should be regarded as interactive and equally plausible.     

Strategy stability and sincerity in approval voting

This paper investigates the problem of strategy stability and sincerity in approval voting. It gives strong support for Fishburn's claim that, among all nonranked voting systems, approval voting is the uniformly most sincere one whenever the number of candidates is not greater than 5.     

Majority rip-off in referendum voting

Many democracies complement a parliamentarian system with elements of direct democracy, where the electorate decides on single issues by majority voting. A well-known paradox states that in a sequence of referenda one can get from an arbitrary original income distribution to one in which one player gets almost all the cake. In this paper we design a three-player game modelling the sequential modification mechanism. The strategic analysis reveals that the paradox survives even with rational strategic voters and though the right to propose is allocated to each player once: the last player receives almost the entire cake. The result can be extended to the three-party n-voter case and is for some cases similar when we consider a random rather than fixed sequence of proposers.

---

Iterative elimination of weakly dominated strategies in binary voting agendas with sequential voting

This paper describes the correspondences between the results given by backward induction (BI) and iterative elimination of weakly dominated strategies (IEWDS) in binary voting agendas with sequential voting. When the voters have strict preferences over all candidates, the strategies that survive IEWDS all select the unique candidate selected by the BI strategy profiles. But if some voters are indifferent, this result no longer holds. However, when there are only two candidates, it is possible to demonstrate strong relationships between the results given by BI and IEWDS, even when some voters have indifferences.     

Impartiality,friendship-networks and voting behavior: Evidence from voting patterns in the Eurovision Song Contest

What is the extent to which a country's political institutions impact aggregate voting behavior in a comparative perspective? More specifically, are citizens in some countries more inclined vote on the basis of ‘quality’ or ‘merit’ over ‘friendship’ or ‘loyalty’, and if so, why? This paper seeks to address how the extent to which a country's political institutions are impartial (treats all citizens equally, free from corruption, strong rule of law) impact aggregate citizen behavior. When political institutions are more (less) impartial, success in society is more often on the basis of merit (patrimonial ties). This test cases is voting in the Eurovision Song Contest (ESC) from 1975 to 2012 among pairs and blocs of ‘voting friends’. The theory elucidates that given that certain pairs or blocs exhibit systematic voting bias for one another over time, the bias will be considerably less among impartial states than those with highly partial institutions. Using several measures of ‘friendship’, I find strong empirical evidence for this claim, even when controlling for myriad alternative factors and taking into account various voting regimes. The analysis gives us new insights on how political institutions condition aggregate citizen behavior in general and that although there is much bias in ESC voting, not all bias is equal among friend-countries.     

Strategic voting in repeated referenda

This paper analyzes learning and voting strategy when a budget maximizing bureaucrat has several chances to obtain referendum approval. The process is modeled as a sequential game with a continuum of heterogeneous voters and a dominant bureaucrat in which all agents are uncertain about the true distribution of voter preferences. The equilibrium concept is perfect Bayes Nash, so voting is strategic in the sense of foresighted but nevertheless noncooperative.Thanks to R. Gretlein, J. Hamilton, T. Palfrey, T. Romer, H. Rosenthal, S. Slutsky and the referees of this journal for their comments and encouragement. They are not responsible for any errors or omissions.     

First and second best voting rules in committees

A committee of people with common preferences but different abilities in identifying the best alternative (e.g., a jury) votes in order to decide between two alternatives. The first best voting rule is a weighted voting rule that takes the different individual competences into account, and is therefore not anonymous, i.e., the voters’ identities matter. Under this rule, it is rational for the committee members to vote according to their true opinions, or informatively. This is not necessarily true for an anonymous voting rule, under which members may have an incentive to vote non-informatively. Thus, strategic, sophisticated voters may vary their voting strategies according to the voting rule rather than naively voting informatively. This paper shows that the identity of the best anonymous and monotone (i.e., quota) voting rule does not depend on whether the committee members are strategic or naive or whether some are strategic and some are naive. One such rule, called the second best rule, affords the highest expected utility in all cases.

“Wasn’t he sweet?” said Yossarian. “Maybe they should give him three votes.” Joseph Heller, Catch-22

     

Powers of subgroups in voting bodies

This paper discusses the power p _n of an n-member subgroup B _n of an N-member voting body, N odd and 1 n N. In contrast to bloc voting, we assume that the members vote independently with equal probability for and against a given issue. Power p _n is defined as the probability that the outcome of a vote changes if all members of B _n reverse their votes. Theorems: p _{n + 1} = _n for odd n < N; p _n + p _{N – n} = 1; P _m + p _n > p _{m + n} if m + n < N; p _{n + 1}/p _n (n + 1)/n as N for fixed even n; for rational 0 > > 1, p _N 2^–1 sin^{–1 1/2} as N . A simple summation formula is given for p _n .     

Probabilistic voting and platform selection in multi-party elections

The literature on stochastic voting to date has focused almost exclusively on models with only two candidates (or parties). This paper studies multiparty competition with stochastic voting. We look at two different models in which candidates aim to maximize their expected vote, as well as a model where the objective of candidates is rank minimization. The equilibria of these models are derived and characterized. We show that the properties of the equilibria are quite different from those derived in deterministic models. Furthermore, the analysis shows that deterministic voting models are not robust since the introduction of even a minute level of uncertainty leads to a drastic change in predictions. Consequently, we argue that the deterministic model provides a misleading benchmark. Stochastic models provide a much richer framework, and the nature of the uncertainty in voter choice is a key determinant of the qualtitative properties of the equilibria.The authors thank Martin Osborne and Maurice Salles for useful comments and suggestions. The first author would also like to thank the Bankard Fund for financial support.     

Sophisticated voting outcomes and agenda control

Necessary and sufficient conditions for an alternative to be a sophisticated voting outcome under an amendment procedure are derived. The uncovered set, as first defined by Miller (1980), is shown to be potentially reducible, and conditions are determined for which this reduction equals the set of sophisticated voting outcomes. In addition, simple methods are given for calculating both the uncovered set and its reduction.Presented at the 1984 Annual Meeting of the Public Choice Society, Phoenix AZ, March 1984. I would like to thank Gerald Kramer, Nicholas Miller, Norman Schofield, two anonymous referees, and especially Richard McKelvey for helpful suggestions and comments.     

Pareto optimality in spatial voting models

This paper studies the Pareto optimality properties of policy proposals that are made byk(k2) strategic candidates that face uncertainty about the choices that the voters will make. Our first theorem shows that, under very general conditions, any proposal that is a best reply for a candidate is necessarily Pareto optimal. This theorem, in turn, implies that, under slightly stronger conditions, all candidate proposals that are made in a Nash equilibrium or sequentially are necessarily Pareto optimal. Our second theorem shows that, when these conditions are themselves slightly strengthened, any proposal outside of the Pareto set is strictly dominated by at least one proposal inside the Pareto set.We would like to acknowledge helpful comments and suggestions provided by Otto Davis and Richard McKelvey