Intended electoral participation in transition countries

This paper examines the determinants of intended electoral participation. We analyze attitudes to both referenda and voting in national elections. Sample survey data are obtained from the Eurobarometer survey of transition countries in Central and Eastern Europe. The empirical results suggest that intended electoral participation increases with age, income and education. But attitudinal variables are also important and in particular confidence in the free market economy and satisfaction with the general development of the country impact positively on intended electoral participation. Received: Received: April 2003 / Accepted: August 2004, Accepted: Received: April 2003 / Accepted: August 2004, JEL Classification: H26, K42 We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of CERGE-EI. We are also grateful for the helpful comments of three anonymous referees, the journal editor and R. Filer and L. Squires.     

Group decision-making: Head-count versus intensity of preference

This paper puts forth a framework for reshaping the group decision-making process. The proposed framework extends from the usual one-issue-at-a-time decision-making to one that involves several related issues simultaneously. Weaknesses of the traditional majority voting mechanism are first identified, and then a different voting method that takes each individual voter's sentiment into account is discussed. Specifically, a decision-maker is asked to express his/her intensity of preference for the issues encountered. Three hierarchical structures—benefits, costs, and risks—are developed to evaluate the alternatives. Due to the nature of pairwise comparisons and synthesis, the proposed method is amenable to consensus building and has higher reliability and consistency. It can be used for candidate selection, e.g. governmental election, when a large population is involved. It is also effective for resource allocation and prioritization when a small group or business is concerned. We believe the proposed approach has potential for resolving deficiencies of the conventional voting mechanism, and can be applied to many real-world problems. Its implementation on the Internet is also discussed.     

Voting requirements, concessions, international side payments and the European Monetary Union

This paper addresses the question of criteria for selection of EMU members. We identify two factors in the decision process: (1) The costs and benefits which the individual countries attribute to alternative EMU arrangements (`hard-core', medium-sized, all EU members), and (2) the binding institutional restrictions, i.e., the distribution of votes in the European Council and the minimum vote requirements. Within this framework the EU countries are assigned to different groups according to their degree of convergence. Based on stability concessions and side payments these groups decide on the final EMU composition. We show that minimum vote requirements can lead to a suboptimal size of the EMU and can threaten the feasibility of a multi-speed monetary union.     

How many voters are needed for paradoxes?

Summary. This paper presents a general procedure for finding profiles with the minimum number of voters required for many important paradoxes. Borda's and Condorcet's classic examples are revisited as well as generalizations. Using Saari's procedure line, we obtain an upper bound for the minimum number of voters needed for a profile for which the Condorcet winner is not strictly top ranked for all weighted positional procedures. Also we give a simple upper bound on the minimum number of voters needed for a set of prescribed voting outcomes. In contrast to situations wherein small numbers of voters are needed, we consider paradoxes requiring arbitrarily large numbers of voters as well as large numbers of alternatives. Finally we indicate connections with statistical rank based tests. Received: April 18, 2001; revised version: May 25, 2001     

Candidate stability and nonbinary social choice

Summary. The requirement that a voting procedure be immune to the strategic withdrawal of a candidate for election can be formalized in different ways. Dutta, Jackson, and Le Breton (Econometrica, 2001) have recently shown that two formalizations of this candidate stability property are incompatible with some other desirable properties of voting procedures. This article shows that Grether and Plott's nonbinary generalization of Arrow's Theorem can be used to provide simple proofs of two of their impossibility theorems. Received: August 15, 2001; revised version: March 11, 2002 RID="*" ID="*" Parts of this article were previously circulated in somewhat different form in a working paper with the same title by the second author. We are grateful to Michel Le Breton and an anonymous referee for their comments. Correspondence to:J.A. Weymark     

Compulsory versus voluntary voting: An experimental study

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 co-existence of compulsory and voluntary voting institutions in nature.     

The geometry of voting power: Weighted voting and hyper-ellipsoids

Suppose legislators represent districts of varying population, and their assembly's voting rule is intended to implement the principle of one person, one vote. How should legislators' voting weights appropriately reflect these population differences? An analysis requires an understanding of the relationship between voting weight and some measure of the influence that each legislator has over collective decisions. We provide three new characterizations of weighted voting that embody this relationship. Each is based on the intuition that winning coalitions should be close to one another. The locally minimal and tightly packed characterizations use a weighted Hamming metric. Ellipsoidal separability employs the Euclidean metric: a separating hyper-ellipsoid contains all winning coalitions, and omits losing ones. The ellipsoid's proportions, and the Hamming weights, reflect the ratio of voting weight to influence, measured as Penrose–Banzhaf voting power. In particular, the spherically separable rules are those for which voting powers can serve as voting weights.     

Advocacy and political convergence under preference uncertainty

We study the formation of advocacy groups and how they can impact policy outcomes by revealing information about voters׳ preferences to uninformed political candidates. We conduct a laboratory experiment based on a two-candidate spatial electoral competition setting where the policy preferences of voters are (initially) unknown and change over time. In the control treatment candidates learn about the preferred policy of the median voter through the voting outcome of elections. In the advocacy treatments, voters can organize themselves into advocacy groups in order to reveal their policy preferences. We find that voters often overcome the collective action problem of forming an advocacy group. In fact, we observe the formation of both informative advocacy groups, which convey new information, and uninformative advocacy groups, which do not. Overall, advocacy groups significantly speed up the convergence to the preferred policy of the median voter. However, advocacy does not lead to higher earnings as the gains from faster convergence are offset by the costs of group formation.     

Can media drive the electorate? The impact of media coverage on voting intentions

A growing literature uses media data to explain perception and behaviour in the economic and political context. In this paper, we investigate how media coverage affects political preferences, namely voting intention. For our empirical analysis, we merge 14 years of human-coded data obtained from leading media in Germany with results of the comprehensive German Politbarometer survey from February 1998 through December 2012. In contrast to the existing literature, we do not utilize access to certain media outlets, but use the tonality of articles and newscasts on political parties and politicians based on human coded media data. To account for endogeneity, we employ instrumental variable probit estimations. In addition, we control for a multitude of (internal) personal characteristics, such as age, and gender, as well as for (external) macroeconomic variables, such as business climate, unemployment, and inflation. The results show that media coverage of a political party has a positive and significant effect on the voting intention for this party. When media outlets cover a political party more positively, the electorate has a greater tendency to vote for it. Hence, we conclude that the electoral success or failure of political parties is at least partially caused by the media coverage on them. This hints on the special responsibility of media in democracies.     

Mortgage market credit conditions and U.S. Presidential elections

Voters punish incumbent Presidential candidates for contractions in the county-level supply of mortgage credit during market-wide contractions of credit, but do not reward them for expansions in mortgage credit supply in boom times. Our primary focus is the Presidential election of 2008, which followed an unprecedented swing from very generous mortgage underwriting standards to a severe contraction of mortgage credit. Voters responded to the credit crunch by shifting their support away from the Republican Presidential candidate in 2008. That shift was large and particularly pronounced in states that typically vote Republican, and in swing states. Without it McCain would have received half the votes needed in nine crucial swing states to reverse the outcome of the election. We extend our analysis to the Presidential elections from 1996 to 2012 and find that voters only react to contractions, not expansions, of credit, and reactions are similar for Democratic and Republican incumbent parties.