The impact of legislator and constituency ideology on voting on the assault weapons ban

Using variables that represent a legislator's entire legal constituency, previous research by social scientists has concluded that views of the legislator's constituency have little effect on how legislators vote. This question is reexamined by defining constituency as those voters most likely to vote for the legislator (i.e., members of the legislator's own political party and independents). Furthermore, instead of measuring constituency by either a demographic or vote-based measure, a survey measure of the ideological identification of voters (i.e., the voter's self-identification as liberal, moderate, or conservative) is introduced. It is found that the ideology of a senator's electoral constituency was an important factor on the recent U.S. Senate vote to ban 19 semi-automatic assault weapons. The findings have important implications for how social scientists conceptualize and measure constituency.     

The two-party system under alternative voting procedures

Countries that elect their policy-makers by means of Plurality Voting tend to have a two-party system. This observation can be explained by the strategic behavior of voters. This article derives two broad classes of voting procedures under which strategic voting behavior induces a two-party system under standard assumptions on voter preferences. One class consists of the voting procedures with unique top-score, i.e., under which a voter can cast a top-score vote for only one candidate (e.g., Plurality Voting, Borda Count). The other class consists of the voting procedures that permit truncated ballots, i.e., under which voters do not have to cast all their votes (e.g., Approval Voting). This analysis suggests that the key for strategic voting behavior to induce a two-party system is that voters can always cast a different score for the two candidates they rank first and second on their ballots.     

A theory of income taxation where politicians focus upon core and swing voters

We construct an equilibrium model of party competition, in which parties are especially concerned with their core and swing voters, concerns which political scientists have focused upon in their attempts to understand party behavior in general elections. Parties compete on an inifinite-dimensional space of possible income-tax policies. A policy is a function that maps pre-fisc income into post-fisc income. Only a fraction of each voter type will vote for each party, perhaps because of issues not modeled here or voter misperceptions of policies. Each party??s policy makers comprise two factions, one concerned with maximizing the welfare of its constituency, or its core, and the other with winning over swing voters. An equilibrium is a pair of parties (endogenously determined), and a pair of policies, one for each party, in which no deviation to another policy will be assented to both its core and swing factions. We characterize the equilibria: they have the property that both parties propose identical treatment of a possibly large interval of middle-income voters, while the ??left?? party gives more to the poor and the ??right?? party more to the rich. An empirical section uses the data of Piketty and Saez on taxation in the US to assess the model??s predictions. We argue that the model is roughly confirmed.     

Is it ever safe to vote strategically?

There are many situations in which mis-coordinated strategic voting can leave strategic voters worse off than they would have been had they not tried to strategise. We analyse the simplest of such scenarios, in which a set of strategic voters all have the same sincere preferences and all contemplate casting the same strategic vote, while all other voters are not strategic. Most mis-coordinations in this framework can be classified as instances of either strategic overshooting (too many voted strategically) or strategic undershooting (too few). If mis-coordination can result in strategic voters ending up worse off than they would have been had they all just voted sincerely, we call the strategic vote unsafe. We show that under every onto and non-dictatorial social choice rule there exist circumstances where a voter has an incentive to cast a safe strategic vote. We extend the Gibbard–Satterthwaite Theorem by proving that every onto and non-dictatorial social choice rule can be individually manipulated by a voter casting a safe strategic vote.     

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

     

Constituent diversity and congress: the case of NAFTA

An important finding of legislative research is that constituency variables are more important predictors of a legislator’s vote when constituent preferences are homogeneous, as opposed to when the various elements of the legislator’s constituency are pulling the legislator in opposing directions (Goff & Grier, Public Choice, 76, 5–20; Bailey & Brady, American Journal of Political Science, 42, 524–544). We examine these expectations on a highly salient vote, the 1993 senate vote on the North American Free Trade Agreement. While we find support for the view that constituency variables are more important in homogeneous than heterogeneous constituencies, we also find that by confining constituency variables to economic factors scholars overlook the importance of constituent ideology on legislator behavior in homogeneous constituencies.     

Die politisierte Sozialstruktur als mittelfristig stabile Basis einer deutschen Normalwahl

A normal vote is a hypothetical election result following exclusively from predispositions of voters towards political parties which result from long-term or middle-term influences. The influence of short-term factors like attractive candidates or issues from the recent campaign have to be eliminated within the abstract model. As an operationalization for German Bundestag elections for this purpose the average vote intentions of population groups are used which are part of the politicized German social structures such as catholics, especially when they attend church frequently, or employees (Arbeitnehmer) and union members who have formed enduring coalitions with a political party. This operationalization is compared with a model originally developed for the United States. According to this model, the long-term factor is measured by party identification. All Bundestag elections of the Kohl era are analyzed, for which the Politbarometer surveys of the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, Mannheim, immediately before the Bundestag elections are used as a data basis. The vote intentions which can be derived from the politicized social structure are shown to be a stabile basis for a German normal vote so that it makes sense to compute normal vote results from 1983 to 1998.     

Pre-election polling and third party candidates

I analyze voters’ incentives in responding to pre-election polls with a third party candidate. Third party supporters normally have an incentive to vote strategically in the election by voting for one of the major candidates. But these voters would vote third party if the third party candidate is doing surprisingly well in the polls. Because voters are more likely to vote third party if the third party candidate is doing well in polls, voters who like the third party candidate best have an incentive to claim they will vote third party in the polls so that more voters will ultimately vote third party in the election. The differing incentives faced during polls and elections accounts for why third party candidates do better in polls than in elections.     

Strategy-proofness of continuous aggregation maps

 We consider continuous aggregation maps (e.g., social welfare functions). By assuming that the voters have preferences over social outcomes, we regard the social decision procedure as a noncooperative game, with the aggregation map as a game form. The map is called strategy-proof if it is a Nash equilibrium that the voters report their most preferred outcomes. We give sufficient topological conditions on the space of outcomes so that only dictatorial maps are strategy-proof. Received: 28 February 1994/Accepted: April 22, 1996     

Maximum likelihood approach to vote aggregation with variable probabilities

The Condorcet-Kemeny-Young statistical approach to vote aggregation is based on the assumption that voters have the same probability of comparing correctly two alternatives and that this probability is the same for any pair of alternatives. We relax the second part of this assumption by letting the probability of comparing correctly two alternatives be increasing with the distance between two alternatives in the allegedly true ranking. This leads to a rule in which the majority in favor of one alternative against another one is given a larger weight the larger the distance between the two alternatives in the true ranking, i.e., the larger the probability that the voters compare them correctly. This rule is not Condorcet consistent and does not satisfy local independence of irrelevant alternatives. Yet, it is anonymous, neutral, and paretian. It also appears that its performance in selecting the alternative most likely to be the best improves with the rate at which the probability increases.We would like to thank Michel Le Breton for his encouragement to examine this question and for his comments, as well as Philippe De Donder, Jean-Yves Duclos, Stephen Gordon, Cyril Téjédo and an anonymous referee for their comments.     

Strategic, sincere, and heuristic voting under four election rules: an experimental study

We report on laboratory experiments on voting. In a setting where subjects have single-peaked preferences, we find that the rational choice theory provides very good predictions of actual individual behavior in one-round and approval voting elections but fares poorly in explaining vote choice under two-round elections. We conclude that voters behave strategically as far as strategic computations are not too demanding, in which case they rely on simple heuristics (under two-round voting) or they just vote sincerely (under single transferable vote).     

Unlikelihood of Condorcet’s paradox in a large society

We provide intuitive, formal, and computational evidence that in a large society Condorcet’s paradox (the intransitivity of social preference obtained by pairwise vote) can hardly occur. For that purpose, we compare two models of social choice, one based on voting and another one based on summing individual cardinal utilities, expressed either in reals, or integers. We show that in a probabilistic model with a large number of independent individuals both models, almost surely, provide the same decision results. This implies that Condorcet’s and Borda’s methods tend to give the same decisions as the number of voters increases. Therefore, in the model with a large number of voters, the transitivity of the Borda preference is inherent in a majority preference as well. Received: 26 June 1998/Accepted: 16 April 1999     

CAMPAIGN SPENDING IN CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS

Past research of the effects of campaign spending in Congressional elections has found, contrary to expectations, that incumbent spending lowers votes he or she receives. Our model simultaneously determines votes and spending and eliminates this anomaly. A measure comparing the incumbent's voting record to constituent preferences aids model identification. Using two-stage least squares, we find that both incumbent and challenger spending are signficant determinants of the popular vote received. Tenure and spending appear to have diminishing returns, and voters appear to punish incumbents who vote against their wishes.     

Time,housework, and the rest of life

Although time envelops all human activities, only now are social scientists giving attention to this variable. Analysis of how American people spent their time in 1965, 1975, and 1985 from national time-diary studies suggests several current beliefs and conclusions that appear misguided or unsupported. Extending the scope of the discussion to include other aspects of peoples' lives (output, satisfactions) suggests ways in which different allocations of time to activities do and do not reflect the value people place on different groups of activities (i.e., lifestyles). Changes in these indicators of social-psychological life over time are needed to help interpret straightforward data on how people spend time.His research interests include social science measurement and methods as well as the impact of technology on social trends. He received his Ph.D. in Sociology and Mathematical Psychology from the University of Michigan.     

Democratically Elected Aristocracies

The article suggests a formal model of a two-tier voting procedure, which unlike traditional voting systems does not presuppose that every vote counts the same. In deciding a particular issue voters are called in the first round to assign categories of their fellow-citizens with differential voting power (or weights) according to the special position or concern individuals are perceived to have with regard to that issue. In the second stage, voters vote on the issue itself according to their substantive view and their votes are counted in the light of the differential weights assigned in the first round. We analyze formal and philosophical reasons that support the model.     

Racial Bias and Prosocial Behavior

The ways in which people exhibit racially biased attitudes are complex. For instance, social scientists differentiate between explicit bias, or bias that is obvious and conscious, and implicit bias, or bias that is to a degree uncontrollable. Many studies focus on how these forms of racial bias relate to discrimination, however, a growing body of research indicates that racial bias can also relate to prosocial behavior. This paper discusses how social scientists measure different forms of racial bias, as well as the effects of racial bias on prosocial behaviors.     

VOTING EXPRESSIVELY

We address a common criticism directed toward models of expressive voting that they are ad hoc in nature. To that end, we propose a foundation for expressive behavior that is based on a novel theory of social preferences under risk. Under our proposal, expressive considerations in behavior arise from the particular way in which risky social prospects are assessed by decision‐makers who want to interpret their choices as moral. To illustrate the scope of our framework, we use it to address some key questions in the literature on expressive voting: why, for expressive considerations, might voters vote against their self‐interest in large elections and why might such elections exhibit a moral bias. Specifically, we consider an electoral set‐up with two alternatives and explain why, when the size of the electorate is large, voters may want to vote for the alternative they deem morally superior even if this alternative happens to be strictly less preferred, in an all‐inclusive sense, than the other. (JEL D01, D03, D81, D72, A13)     

Social Conservatism, New Republicans, and the 1980 Election

Using data from the 1980 National Election Study, we examinethe claims (1) that those voters who shifted to Ronald Reaganin 1980 ("New Republicans") were drawn disproportionately fromthe lower to middle strata of the population: (2) that theywere social conservatives motivated by issues like abortionand ERA: and (3) that they were more religious and alienatedfrom the federal government than average. Our results stronglysuggest that all of these assertions are false and thus questionthe emergence of a "neopopulist" or "Middle American Radical"political constituency on the right wing of American politics.Our findings also have implications for prominent theories aboutconservative political movements and about the changing natureof party politics in a postindustrial society.     

Multiple votes,ballot truncation and the two-party system: an experiment

Duverger’s law states that Plurality Voting tends to favor a two-party system. We conducted laboratory experiments to study whether voting procedures other than Plurality Voting could favor a two-party system as well. Plurality Voting is compared with Approval Voting and Dual Voting, both of which allow to vote for multiple candidates, but differ in whether voters are required to cast all their votes. We find that in most elections held under Plurality Voting and Approval Voting, at most two candidates are viable. By contrast, three candidates are viable in a sizable number of elections held under Dual Voting due to strategic voting. Our evidence suggests that Approval Voting may encourage a two-party system, whereas Dual Voting may encourage multipartism. The voters’ ability to truncate ballots (i.e., not cast all their votes) is essential for supporting the two-party system under Approval Voting.     

What is the KKK a Case Of? Extreme Cases as Analytic Device

Social scientists frequently deploy extreme or rare cases as analytic devices to produce insight into broader social processes. Such a move requires that analysts understand what their object of inquiry is in fact “a case of.” Focusing on the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) as one emblematic instance of an extreme case, this article considers the stakes associated with casing decisions around rare and extreme phenomena. Interrogating how the KKK has been understood as both an object of inquiry (i.e. a case) and a signal of broader social processes (i.e. a variable), the discussion emphasizes how to view the associated literature to more reflexively examine the KKK, as well as gain more global insight into the value and cautions associated with using extreme cases to produce generalizable conclusions.