Computer-assisted constrained approval voting

Approval voting, proposed independently by several analysts in the 1970s, is a voting system in which voters can vote for as many candidates as they like in multicandidate elections. Recently, S.J. Brams modified this system, introducing so-called constrained approval voting. It is designed for a professional association to ensure equitable representation of different interests. In his new system approval voting is combined with the constraints on the number of persons that can be elected from different categories of members. In the present paper the problem of constrained approval voting is formulated (following the work of R.F. Potthoff) as an integer programming problem. Some computational aspects of this problem are discussed. The paper presents a numerical example illustrating a possibility to apply the discussed voting procedure in the election of members of the Committee for Organization and Management Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences.     

The Third Vote Experiment: Enhancing Policy Representation of a Student Parliament

Since voters are often swayed more by the personal image of politicians than by party manifestos, they may cast votes that are in opposition to their policy preferences. This results in the election of representatives who do not correspond exactly to the voters’ own views. An alternative voting procedure to avoid this type of election failure is prompted by the approach implemented in internet voting advice applications, like the German Wahl-O-Mat, which asks the user a number of questions on topical policy issues; the computer program, drawing on all the parties’ answers, finds for the user the best-matching party, the second-best-matching party, etc. Under the proposed alternative election method, the voters cast no direct votes. Rather, they are asked about their preferences on the policy issues as declared in the party manifestos (Introduce nationwide minimum wage? Yes/No; Introduce a speed limit on the motorways? Yes/No, etc.), which reveals the balance of public opinion on each issue. These embedded referenda measure the degree to which the parties’ policies match the preferences of the electorate. The parliament seats are then distributed among the parties in proportion to their indices of popularity (the average percentage of the population represented on all the issues) and universality (frequency in representing a majority). This paper reports on an experimental application of this method during the election of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology Student Parliament on July 4–8, 2016. The experiment shows that the alternative election method can increase the representativeness of the Student Parliament. We also discuss some traits and bottlenecks of the method that should be taken into account when preparing elections.     

Siding with the underdog: is your customer voting effort a sweet deal for your competitors?

In this research, we explore the negative consequences of engaging customer participation through voting mechanisms. Specifically, we draw attention to the double risk of customer voting, first by identifying the adverse effects of losing, and then by revealing the potential of turning an already engaged set of customers over to underdog competitors. We first establish that the losing effect is distinct from that of a voting (empowerment) effect (Pilot Study). We then replicate the losing effect and show that losing (as opposed to winning) voters tend to experience stronger levels of disempowerment and identify more with the underdog (Study 1). Finally, we demonstrate that losing voters are more likely to choose a competitor brand over the incumbent brand, particularly when the competitor is perceived to be an underdog (Study 2). Our findings caution brand managers to reconsider their customer engagement strategy when it involves customer voting.     

Resolving Group Choice Paradoxes Using Probabilistic and Fuzzy Concepts

The standard assumption of modern social choice theory is that the individuals are endowed with complete and transitive preference relations over the decision alternatives. A large number of incompatibility results has been achieved regarding aggregation of these kinds of preferences. Yet, most voting procedures make no use of this information. Instead they essentially cut down the information provided by the voters. In this paper we deal with some alternatives to the complete and transitive voter preference assumption. Particular attention is paid to imprecise notions: probabilistic and fuzzy preference relations. Rather than establishing new impossibility results, our focus is in resolving various voting paradoxes using imprecise preference concepts.     

Extrinsic Cues and the Evaluation of Political Candidates

In a political landscape where the content of politics is getting more and more complex and political parties less and less different, voters often base their voting behavior on extrinsic rather than intrinsic cues, a bundle of extrinsic cues constructed as an image and based on perceived personal traits. Based on survey data from a sample of Norwegian voters, this paper tests how a political candidate's credibility, charisma, and physical attractiveness are related to voters’ judgments of suitability for a leading political position. Across three different politicians, the results show that credibility plays a significant role in the evaluations performed by voters. More surprisingly, charisma does not have the expected effect, and to voters, physical attractiveness is found to be more important than charisma.     

Approval voting in scientific and engineering societies

Approval voting is a system in which members can vote for as many candidates as they like in multicandidate elections. In 1987 and 1988, four scientific and engineering societies, collectively comprising some 350,000 members, used this election reform for the first time. Their reasons for adoption varied but centered around efforts to elect consensus candidates. Approval voting has indeed elected so-called Condorcet candidates, who can defeat all other candidates in pairwise contests. Moreover, these winners generally enjoy support among different classes of voters, so they are not merely lowest common denominators, as some analysts had feared. In at least one instance, approval voting would have led to a different winner from plurality voting (in which voters can vote for exactly one candidate); arguably, this winner would have been the better social choice because he had wider support than his closest opponent. On another occasion, approval voting led to ideological voting—in which the voting patterns reflected an underlying ordering of the candidates—but voting in most societies tends to be nonideological. Overall, the recent experimentation with approval voting has shown that it not only may make a difference but also elects broadly acceptable candidates.     

Searching for a Compromise in Multiple Referendum

We consider a multiple referendum setting where voters cast approval ballots, in which they either approve or disapprove of each of finitely many dichotomous issues. A program is a set of socially approved issues. Assuming that individual preferences over programs are derived from ballots by means of the Hamming distance criterion, we consider two alternative notions of compromise. The majoritarian compromise is the set of all programs supported by the largest majority of voters at the minimum utility loss. A program is an approval compromise if it is supported by the highest number of voters at a utility loss at most half of the maximal achievable one. We investigate the conditions under which issue-wise majority voting allows for reaching each type of compromise. Finally, we argue that our results hold for many other preferences that are consistent with the observed ballots.     

Political Opinion Leadership and Electoral Behavior

SUMMARY

A micro-model that focuses on political opinion leadership within an extended nomological network is developed and tested. Data were gathered from a sample of voters in an election. The results indicate that political opinion leadership played a central role in the voting behavior. Key antecedents to opinion leadership were voter involvement, subjective knowledge, and indirectly, information seeking behavior. Important consequences were voting stability, perceived risk and political satisfaction.     

An Election Method to Improve Policy Representation of a Parliament

Since voters are often swayed more by the charisma, personal image and communication skills of the individual candidates standing for election than by the parties’ political manifestos, they may cast votes that are actually in opposition to their policy preferences. Such a type of behavior, known as ‘irrational voting’, results in the election of representatives who do not correspond exactly to the voters’ own views. The example of the 2013 German Bundestag shows that the method used to elect it results in inadequate policy representation. The analysis of these elections (see, Tangian, 2016) led to an alternative method which is discussed in this paper. In the alternative method the voters’ policy preferences are taken into account explicitly by means of embedded referenda, testing the matching of the candidates’ policy profiles with that of the electorate. Then the parties are indexed, not with respect to the percentage of votes received but with respect to their representativeness indices of popularity (the average percentage of the population represented) and universality (frequency in representing a majority), as introduced in the previous paper mentioned. The method is then hypothetically applied to redistribute the Bundestag seats among the party factions, producing a considerable gain in the representativeness of the Bundestag. Finally, we discuss mixed election procedures combining the elements of traditional voting schemes with the proposed method.     

Further Support for Ranking Candidates in Elections

We compare the Condorcet Efficiencies of the plurality rule, the negative plurality rule, and the Borda rule to examine what might be gained by using a voting rule that requires candidate rankings. Previous analyses have considered (1) voting situations for which the three rules determine different candidates as winners (and the Condorcet Efficiencies might actually differ across the three rules) as well as (2) refined measures of Group Mutual Coherence that assess the presence of underlying models of rational behavior that governs voter preferences. In this paper, we present the final step of this particular line of analysis by analyzing (1) and (2) simultaneously. We conclude that there is a considerable benefit on the basis of Condorcet Efficiency from asking voters to submit candidate rankings in three-candidate elections.     

Voting decision-making of low-income consumers: Literature review and research agenda

This review article examines why and how low-income voters decide to vote for a political candidate. A total of 163 articles in the last 80 years (1944–2023) have been identified through a systematic literature review. Thereafter, the fragmented literature has been organized using a fusion of 3W1H and TCCM (Theory, context, characteristics, and method) frameworks to obtain a comprehensive overview of the low-income voters' behaviour. Accordingly, the study has explained the voting contexts of poor consumers. Besides, the fundamental theories and methods employed in this research domain have been identified. This study revealed three characteristics of ‘voting choice’ of low-income consumers (group identity, communication characteristics, and political environment characteristics) that have been further classified under several sub-themes. This review article pioneers to provide an integrated and organized analysis of the literature on the voting behaviour of low-income consumers, highlighting critical research gaps in theories, contexts, methods, and antecedents that future researchers can examine to extend the discourse in this realm.     

A theory of reasoned action perspective of voting behavior: Model and empirical test

A model based on the theory of reasoned action was developed to analyze voting behavior. Based on an empirical test in Singapore, the proposed model was found to be generally effective in predicting the intentions of voters. Attitudes toward the candidate and political party contributed more to explaining variation in voting intention than interpersonal and mass media subjective-norm components. Direct measures of affect served to better account for voting intention variation than componentially derived measures, although they did not completely mediate the latter's effect. Implications of the findings are discussed and suggestions for future research furnished © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Consumer Regulation Strategies: Attenuating the Effect of Consumer References in a Voting Context

Consumption cues (e.g., brands, money, and advertisements) can have powerful effects on cognition, perception, and behavior, yet how people regulate responses to such cues is not well understood. This is surprising given that consumption cues are increasingly present in nontraditional consumer contexts, such as healthcare, education, and politics. This research develops a measure of two types of consumer regulation strategies, cue‐based and budget‐based (studies 1–4), and demonstrates that these strategies influence how people respond to consumption cues in a political context (study 5). Specifically, in a study involving the 2012 American Presidential Election, priming survey participants as consumers (versus citizens) influenced both voting intentions and self‐reported voting behavior, and the newly developed consumer regulation scale was instrumental in detecting this effect. These findings suggest there may be merit in the escalating debate and concern over referring to voters as consumers.     

依赖与突破——从X村委会选举分析村民投票行为的路径

从X村村民投票选举原妇女主任彭女当选为村主任的行为锁定入手,从信息不完全和交易费用的存在两方面,分析了村民投票行为路径依赖的原因,并从外部力量、学习机制和激励机制三方面,提出了突破路径依赖的思路。     

Voting Paradoxes and MCDM

Many, if not most, problems in group decision making can be translated into MCDM problems by substituting criteria for voters. Yet, there has been very little discussion about the implications of various types of voting paradoxes to MCDM. The classic voting paradoxes, viz. Borda's and Condorcet's, have obvious implications for certain MCDM situations. The latter implies that the notion of the best alternative, given a set of criteria and information about the ordinal ranking of the alternatives on those criteria, can be essentially arbitrary. The former, in turn, demonstrates a particularly clear case of conflict between reasonable intuitions. Completely unexplored are implications of compound majority paradoxes to MCDM. The paper deals with Ostrogorski's and Anscombe's paradoxes which result from non-bisymmetry and non-associativity of the majority relation. Moreover, we shall discuss the implications of paradox of multiple elections which is a situation where the result of multiple-item election may be a policy alternative that nobody voted for.     

Does Industry Regulation Matter? New Evidence on Audit Committees and Earnings Management

This paper investigates the moderating role of industry regulation on the effectiveness of audit committees in restricting earnings management. Using comprehensive panel data of S&P 1500 firms between 2003 and 2007, we find that the proportion of CEO directors on an audit committee is positively associated with earnings management in unregulated industries, while this association is significantly weaker in regulated industries. Further, the proportion of financial experts on an audit committee is negatively associated with earnings management. Our results also indicate that the average board tenure of audit committee members is negatively related to earnings management in regulated industries, but positively affects earnings management in unregulated industries. Finally, audit committee members’ average directorship increases earnings management in regulated industries, but reduces earnings management in unregulated industries. Overall, our results suggest that the effectiveness of audit committees in reducing earnings management and improving financial reporting quality is influenced by industry regulation.     

Direct Election of Group Decision-Makers Can Facilitate Cooperation in the Public Goods Game

Research on social dilemma has shown that the delegation of decision-making to group leaders can increase cooperation in the collective action problem. In this paper, we show that the voting scheme used for the election of leaders could make a difference to the emergence of cooperation. We design a public goods game experiment in which actors elect leaders to make decisions on their behalf in the contribution to public goods. In particular, we compare the leadership elected from direct and indirect election systems. In direct election, a leader is elected directly by majority-votes from a group, whereas in indirect election the group is divided into smaller subgroups and a leader is elected from the elected subgroup leaders. We run a simulation model to show that direct election would choose a more cooperative leader than indirect election when voters’ preferences of leadership are not homogenous. A laboratory experiment with human subjects further indicates that people hold stronger preferences for cooperators as leaders in direct election than in indirect election, suggesting that the voting scheme has an effect not only on the processing of actors’ preferences, but also on the shaping of their preferences of leadership in the public goods dilemma.     

Market Segmentation and Product Differentiation in Political Campaigns: A Technical Feature Perspective

The perceived importance of five technical service qualities (Gronroos 1984) or features (i.e. national and local policies, leaders, values and candidates), and voters’ ratings of the Labour and Conservative Parties’ competence on each of these parameters, were investigated during the 2001 British General Election using an a priori segmentation method and the classification tree statistical technique for data analysis. Voter ratings of the technical service features were found to be indicators of intention to vote. A product differentiation approach is most likely to influence voting intention, because the technical service features are more readily manipulated through marketing programmes than demographic and customer characteristics (Bucklin and Gupta 1992). Ratings of technical service features are stronger indicators of voting intention than voter demographics and characteristics. A product differentiation approach, based around technical service features, would be the most effective focus for strategy development in future political marketing campaigns.     

新农村建设中公共物品偏好显示机制分析

新农村建设的核心问题是公共物品的供给问题。根据公共选择经济学派的理论,通过设计一种偏好显示机制,反映农村社会对公共物品的偏好,是解决农村公共物品最优供给问题的有效途径。现有的相对多数票、序数投票法、二二比较法等机制存在着信号显示不全、结果的发散性等问题。根据现有机制的分析,设计的多阶段集体否决投票法,有着较好的激励机制、信号显示完整、收敛性等特点,不失为一种可供选择的农村公共物品偏好显示机制。     

Policy Representation of a Parliament: The Case of the German Bundestag 2013 Elections

Since voters are often swayed more by the charisma, personal image and communication skills of the individual candidates standing for election than by the parties’ political manifestos, they may cast votes that are actually in opposition to their policy preferences. Such a type of behavior, known as ‘irrational voting’, results in the election of representatives who do not correspond exactly to the voters’ own views. To illustrate this, we consider the 28 German parties that took part in the 2013 Bundestag (federal) election and compare their positions on 36 topical issues with the results of public opinion polls. Then we construct the party and coalition indices of popularity (the average percentage of the population represented) and universality (frequency in representing a majority). In particular, we find that the 2013 election winner, the conservative union CDU/CSU with their 41.5 % of the votes, was the least representative among the 28 parties considered. The representativeness of the Bundestag is about 50 %, as if the correspondence with the electorate’s preference on every policy issue had been decided by tossing a coin, meaning that the Bundestag’s policy profile is independent of that of the electorate. The next paper, ‘An election method to improve policy representation of a parliament’ (Tangian 2016), suggests a possible way to surmount the problems revealed by our analysis. An alternative election procedure is proposed and hypothetically applied to the 2013 Bundestag, producing a considerable gain in its representativeness.