On the Constitutional Choice of a Democratic Voting Rule

Public Choice, 1969

This paper is a study in the theory of committees and elections. By a committee we will mean any group of people who arrive at a decision by means of voting. By a voting scheme I we will mean any method by which individual voting decisions are aggregated into committee decisions. Given various voting schemes we shall examine three techniques by which members may seek to manipulate committee decisions to their advantage: a) additions or deletions to the alternatives to be considered b) deliberate distortions of one's own voting preferences c) manipulation of the order in .which alternatives are voted upon, and shall prove some theorems about rational voting behavior when preferences are unidimensionally scalable.

2011

This paper uses laboratory experiments to study the impact of voting mechanism on voter participation and on the sincerity of voting decisions. Under jury decision-making setups in which individuals have the common value but noisy private information regarding the true states of nature, two voting mechanisms are studied: (1) compulsory voting, where individual voters are required to vote, and (2) voluntary voting, where voters may choose to vote or to abstain. The theoretical literature predicts that under compulsory voting, rational voters have an incentive to vote strategically, against their private information regarding the true states of nature, but that under voluntary voting, voters would rationally follow their private information (i.e. vote sincerely) with endogenously determined participation rates. We propose to test the theory of voting mechanisms in the lab by controlling voting institutions and individual costs of voting. ∗This paper is preliminary and includes only th...

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2022

Different voting rules are commonly used to settle collective decisions. A promising way to assess voting rules, for which little is known, is to compare the expressive utility that voters derive from voting with each rule. In this paper, we first propose an ordinal theory of expressive voting that allows us to compare voting rules in terms of the expressive utility that voters derive from voting (their expressive power). Our theory provides a novel testable implication according to which expected turnout increases with expressive power. We then ran an online experiment to test this implication in a controlled environment. We find that if voters are made aware of different voting rules, turnout is higher in voting rules with higher expressive power. Our results also suggest that, all else equal, the higher the expressive power of a voting rule the higher the expressive utility derived from voting and the better the voting rule represents voters' actual preferences. These results suggest that the expressive power of voting rules is a relevant criterion when deciding which voting rule to use in economic and political decisions.

Behavioral & Experimental Economics eJournal, 2017

In two laboratory surveys run in France during the 2014 European Elections, we asked the participants to provide their personal evaluations of the parties in terms of ideological proximity, and asked how they would vote under three proportional, closed-list voting rules : the (official) single-vote rule, a split-my-vote rule, and a list-approval rule. The paper analyzes the relation between opinions and vote, under the three systems. Compared to multi-vote rules, the single-vote system leads to voters’ decisions that are more often strategic but also more often sincere. Sincere voting and strategic voting therefore appear to be more consistent than contradictory. Multi-vote rules allow the voter to express complex behavior, and the concepts of “sincere” and “strategic” voting are not always sufficient to render this complexity.

Let X be a set of social alternatives, and let V be a set of 'votes' or 'signals'. (We do not assume any structure on X or V). A variable population voting rule F takes any number of anonymous votes drawn from V as input, and produces a nonempty subset of X as output. The rule F satisfies reinforcement if, whenever two disjoint sets of voters independently select some subset Y ⊆ X , the union of these two sets will also select Y. We show that F satisfies reinforcement if and only if F is a balance rule. If F satisfies a form of neutrality, then F satisfies reinforcement if and only if F is a scoring rule (with scores taking values in an abstract linearly ordered abelian group R); this generalizes a result of .

2009

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 (in two-round elections) or they just vote sincerely (in single transferable vote elections).

2004

The choice of the electoral system should be delegated to the citizens. However, citizens are not sufficiently informed to choose the system directly. It is argued that they may instead state their preferences for two basic characteristics of a Parliament, i.e. Governability and Representativeness. It is then possible to choose the system through a purely technical procedure. An experiment illustrates the method.

Political Science Quarterly, 2009

2009

In this paper, we expose the results of a voting experiment realised in 2007, during the French Presidential election. This experiment aimed at confronting the Single Transferable vote (SVT) procedure to two criteria : simplicity and the selection of a Condorcet-winner. Building on our electoral sample's preferences, we show that this voting procedure can design a different winner, depending on the vote counting process. With the vote counting process advocated by Hare, the winner is Nicolas Sarkozy, while the Coombs vote counting process has François Bayrou as winner. For these two vote counting processes, the details of the experiment are the same and it is shown that the simplicity criterion is respected. However, with regard to the Condorcet-winner criterion, the Coombs methods is the only one to elect the Condorcet-winner, i.e. François Bayrou.

adaptive agents and multi agents systems, 2017

Various voting rules (or social choice procedures) have been proposed to select a winner from the preferences of an entire population: Plurality, veto, Borda, Minimax, Copeland, etc. Although in theory, these rules may yield drastically different outcomes, for real-world datasets, behavioral social choice analyses have found that the rules are often in perfect agreement with each other! This work attempts to give a mathematical explanation of this phenomenon. We quantify the gap between the outcomes of two voting rules by the pairwise margin between their winners. We show that for many common voting rules, the gap between them can be almost as large as 1 when the votes are unrestricted. As a counter, we study the behavior of voting rules when the vote distribution is a uniform mixture of a small number of multinomial logit distributions. This scenario corresponds to a population consisting of a small number of groups, each voting according to a latent preference ranking. We show that for any such voting profile on g groups, at least 1/2g fraction of the population prefers the winner of a Borda election to any other candidate.

2012

We report on an experiment comparing compulsory and voluntary voting institutions in a voting game with common preferences. Rational choice theory predicts sharp differences in voter behavior between these two institutions. If voting is compulsory, then voters may find it rational to vote insincerely, i.e., against their private information. If voting is voluntary so that abstention is allowed, then sincere voting in accordance with a voter's private information is always rational while participation may become strategic. We find strong support for these theoretical predictions in our experimental data. Moreover, voters adapt their decisions to the voting institution in place in such a way as to make the group decision accuracy differences between the two voting institutions negligible. The latter finding may serve to rationalize the coexistence of compulsory and voluntary voting institutions in nature.

RePEc: Research Papers in Economics, 1999

The paper describes a weighted-voting system for the election of a Parliament. The system is easy to implement, and it dominates plurality, where "dominates" means that it performs better with reference to both representativeness and stability. The system has some other nice properties, namely (a) it offers an easy-to-read evaluation of the loss of representativeness of an electoral system; and (b) it makes it relatively easy to adopt the best system after the vote, i.e. the best system conditional to the choice of electors. Indicators for representativeness and stability are defined. Results are experimental.

JOURNAL OF POWER, POLITICS & GOVERNANCE, 2018

Under the present electoral system every citizen is entitled to voting for only one political party. However, pluralism is a cornerstone notion for democracies and consequently, when voters are entitled to voting for more than one political party, their option tends to extend on the grounds that they are provided with the capability of expressing their opinion holistically and are not confined to a single option. Such a method could be a point system, where each voter possesses a sum of points which are distributed in accordance with the voter's preferences. Consequently, this electoral system could be named "Preference -Point-Based Electoral System" (henceforth PPBES) and it should be noted that current developed would facilitate the existence of the aforementioned electoral system. The present paper aims at presenting a new electoral system, where voters are entitled to multiple options voting for.

2003

There are many ways to aggregate individual preferences to a collective preference or outcome. The outcome is strongly dependent on the aggregation procedure (election mechanism), rather than on the individual preferences. The Dutch election procedure is based on proportional representation, one nation-wide district, categoric voting and the Plurality ranking rule, while the British procedure is based on non-proportional representation, many districts, categoric voting and the Plurality choice rule to elect one candidate for every district. For both election mechanisms we indicate a number of paradoxes. The German hybrid system is a combination of the Dutch and British system and hence inherits the paradoxes of both systems. The STV system, used in Ireland and Malta, is based on proportional representation (per district) and on ordinal voting. Although designed with the best intentions – no vote should be wasted – , it is prone to all kinds of paradoxes. May be the worst one is that more votes for a candidate may cause him to lose his seat. The AV system, used in Australia, is based on non-proportional representation (per district) and on ordinal voting. It has all the unpleasant properties of the STV system. The same holds for the French majority-plurality rule. Arrow’s impossibility theorem is presented, roughly saying that no ‘perfect’ election procedure exists. More precisely, it gives a characterization of the dictatorial rule: it is the only preference rule that is IIA and satisfies the Pareto condition. Finally we mention characterizations of the Borda rule, the Plurality ranking rule, the British FPTP system and of k-vote rules.