Size approval voting

We propose a new class of voting procedures, called Size Approval Voting, according to which, the effective weight of a vote from a given individual depends on how many other candidates that individual votes for. In particular, weights are assumed to be non-negative and weakly decreasing in the number of approved candidates. Then, for a given profile of individual votes, all candidates with the maximal sum of weighted votes are elected. We show in our axiomatic analysis that the family of all Size Approval Voting procedures is characterized by a set of natural properties.     

Weighted approval voting

To allow society to treat unequal alternatives distinctly we propose a natural extension of Approval Voting by relaxing the assumption of neutrality. According to this extension, every alternative receives ex-ante a strictly positive and finite weight. These weights may differ across alternatives. Given the voting decisions of every individual (individuals are allowed to vote for, or approve of, as many alternatives as they wish to), society elects the alternative for which the product of total number of votes times exogenous weight is maximal. If the product is maximal for more than one alternative, a pre-specified tie-breaking rule is applied. Our main result is an axiomatic characterization of this family of voting procedures.      

A live experiment on approval voting

This paper presents a large-scale experiment on the Approval Voting rule that took place during the 2002 French presidential election. We describe the experiment and its main results. The findings are as follows: (i) Such an experiment is feasible, and very well accepted by voters. (ii) The principle of approval voting is easily understood and accepted. (iii) Within the observed political context, compared to the official first-round vote, approval voting modifies the overall ranking of candidates. (iv) The candidates Le Pen and Chirac, more than the others, were able to convert approval votes into official first-round votes. JEL Classification C93, D70, D72     

Would letting people vote for multiple candidates yield policy moderation?

We investigate whether letting people vote for multiple candidates would yield policy moderation. We do so in a setting that takes three key features of elections into account, namely, strategic voting, endogenous candidacy and policy motivation on the part of the candidates. We consider two classes of voting rules. One class consists of the voting rules where each voter casts several equally-weighed votes for the different candidates. The other class consists of the voting rules where each voter rank-orders the candidates. We identify conditions under which these voting rules yield policy moderation. We also show that these voting rules may yield policy extremism instead of policy moderation if one (or several) of the conditions is not satisfied! Finally, we find that amongst these voting rules the extent of policy moderation is maximal under the Borda Count if we consider only equilibria where all candidates are serious contenders. However, this result does not carry over to spoiler equilibria, where Approval Voting can yield more moderate policy outcomes than the Borda Count.     

Coordinated voting in sequential and simultaneous elections: some experimental evidence

This paper studies a situation wherein a set of voters choose between two alternatives in the presence of a payoff externality. Specifically, regardless of her intrinsic preference, a voter’s payoff is maximized should she vote for the alternative that garners a majority of the votes cast. Are votes coordinated on a single alternative? Using laboratory experiments, we examine voting patterns in sequential voting and simultaneous voting elections. Across both election types, we also vary the amount of information that an individual voter has regarding the intrinsic preferences of the other voters. Our main findings are as follows. In the “low” information treatment, sequential voting elections facilitate coordinated voting. However, in the “high” information treatment, voting patterns are not dependent on how the election is structured.     

Storable votes

Motivated by the need for more flexible decision-making mechanisms in the European Union, the paper proposes a simple but novel voting scheme for binary decisions taken by committees that meet regularly over time. At each meeting, committee members are allowed to store their vote for future use; the decision is then taken according to the majority of votes cast. The possibility of shifting votes intertemporally allows agents to concentrate their votes when preferences are more intense, and although the scheme will not achieve full efficiency, storable votes typically lead to ex ante welfare gains over non-storable votes. Welfare gains can be proven rigorously in the case of 2 voters. With more voters, counterexamples can be found, but the analysis suggests that the welfare improvements should continue to hold if one of the following conditions is satisfied: (i) the number of voters is above a minimum threshold; (ii) preferences are not too polarized; (iii) the horizon is long enough.     

Fully sincere voting

In a general social choice framework where the requirement of strategy-proofness may not be sensible, we call a social choice rule fully sincere if it never gives any individual an incentive to vote for a less-preferred alternative over a more-preferred one and provides an incentive to vote for an alternative if and only if it is preferred to the default option that would result from abstaining. If the social choice rule can depend only on the number of votes that each alternative receives, those rules satisfying full sincerity are convex combinations of the rule that chooses each alternative with probability equal to the proportion of the vote it receives and an arbitrary rule that ignores voters' preferences. We note a sense in which the natural probabilistic analog of approval voting is the fully sincere rule that allows voters maximal flexibility in expressing their preferences and gives these preferences maximal weight.     

Fully sincere voting

In a general social choice framework where the requirement of strategy-proofness may not be sensible, we call a social choice rule fully sincere if it never gives any individual an incentive to vote for a less-preferred alternative over a more-preferred one and provides an incentive to vote for an alternative if and only if it is preferred to the default option that would result from abstaining. If the social choice rule can depend only on the number of votes that each alternative receives, those rules satisfying full sincerity are convex combinations of the rule that chooses each alternative with probability equal to the proportion of the vote it receives and an arbitrary rule that ignores voters' preferences. We note a sense in which the natural probabilistic analog of approval voting is the fully sincere rule that allows voters maximal flexibility in expressing their preferences and gives these preferences maximal weight.     

ALL IN: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF LEGISLATIVE VOTING ON INTERNET GAMBLING RESTRICTIONS IN THE UNITED STATES

In 2006, the U.S. Congress passed the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) which prohibited financial institutions from processing transactions arising from online gaming activities, thereby severely hindering U.S. residents from participating in online casino games, primarily poker. Enactment of this legislation followed lobbying and political pressure from a variety of interest groups. By examining House roll call votes, we identify empirically the sources of political influence that resulted in passage of the internet gambling legislation. We find that party affiliation was of primary importance, with Republicans more likely to vote in favor of the bill. The percentage of constituents who are Evangelical Christians and also the number of gambling establishments in the district were positively associated with votes for the bill. However, contributions from the gaming industry decreased the probability a congressman would vote for the bill. (JEL D72, L83)     

Do non-citizens affect U.S. Congressional elections?

U.S. citizens against immigration argue that immigrants commit voter fraud and skew election outcomes towards progressive candidates. These arguments have increased in number and severity since the Supreme Court ruled in 2013 that states cannot require photo identification from voters. We examine whether the size of the non-citizen population is related to election outcomes. Previous research indicates that non-citizens sway elections in favour of progressive candidates but only in elections where the victory margin is small. We find no evidence of a relationship between non-citizens and vote outcomes. We find evidence that the percent of the population that is non-white is positively related to percent of votes cast for democratic candidates.     

Constant scoring rules,condorcet criteria and single-peaked preferences

Summary A constant scoring rule asks each individual to vote for a given (and constant) number of alternatives and the alternative with the most votes is elected. A sequential constant scoring rule applies this principle in a process of sequential elimination. Constant scoring rules as well as sequential constant scoring rules fail to satisfy Condorcet criteria when individual preferences are unrestricted. The purpose of this paper is to show that, if we assume that preferences are single-peaked, then some constant scoring rules satisfy the Condorcet loser criterion and some sequential constant scoring rules satisfy the Condorcet winner criterion. The results we provide make possible the identification of these rules.I thank Maurice Salles and two anonymous referees for their helpful comments. The usual disclaimers apply.     

Median‐voter Equilibria in the Neoclassical Growth Model under Aggregation*

We study a dynamic version of Meltzer and Richard's median‐voter model where agents differ in wealth. Taxes are proportional to income and are redistributed as equal lump‐sum transfers. Voting occurs every period and each consumer votes for the tax that maximizes his welfare. We characterize time‐consistent Markov‐perfect equilibria twofold. First, restricting utility classes, we show that the economy's aggregate state is mean and median wealth. Second, we derive the median‐voter's first‐order condition interpreting it as a tradeoff between distortions and net wealth transfers. Our method for solving the steady state relies on a polynomial expansion around the steady state.     

Incumbency advantages in the Canadian Parliament

Abstract We apply a regression discontinuity approach to determine incumbency advantages in the Canadian Parliament, finding that incumbents enjoy a 9.4–11.2% increased probability of winning over non‐incumbents. Owing to the presence of multiple parties, an incumbency advantage in terms of vote share does not always translate to an increased probability of winning, because incumbents do not necessarily obtain votes from their closest opponent. Also, under the assumption that strategic exit is not an issue, we are able to split the incumbency advantage into party incumbency and individual candidate incumbency components, finding that the advantage is almost entirely due to the individual.     

The Political Economy of the (Weak) Enforcement of Indirect Taxes

The objective of this paper is to understand the determinants of the enforcement level of indirect taxation in a positive setting. We build a sequential game where individuals, who differ in their willingness to pay for a taxed good, vote over the enforcement level. Firms then compete à la Cournot and choose the fraction of sales taxes to evade. We assume in most of the paper that the tax rate is set exogenously. Voters face the following trade‐off: more enforcement not only increases tax collection but also increases the consumer price of the goods sold in an imperfectly competitive market. We obtain that the equilibrium enforcement level is the one most preferred by the individual with the median willingness to pay, that it is not affected by the structure of the market (number of firms) and the firms’ marginal cost, and that it decreases with the resource cost of evasion and with the tax rate. We also compare the enforcement level chosen by majority voting with the utilitarian level. In the last section, we endogenize the tax rate by assuming that individuals vote simultaneously over tax rate and enforcement level. We prove the existence of a Condorcet winner and show that it entails full enforcement (i.e., no tax evasion at equilibrium). The existence of markets with less than full enforcement then depends crucially on the fact that tax rates are not tailored to each market individually.     

The problem of political calculation in autocracies

Autocrats depend on their followers to remain in power. They compensate the followers in exchange for their support. Yet, they have few tools to guide them in determining the compensation commensurate with the value of each follower’s support. The failure of political calculation can easily lead to the autocrat’s demise. In semi-authoritarian and democratic regimes, elections provide a solution to the problem of political calculation. In elections, citizens cast votes in exchange for public or private goods. Thus, the number of votes received by candidates and parties can be used as a proxy for the value of their support.     

Estimating Presidential Elections: The Importance of State Fixed Effects and the Role of National Versus Local Information

Explaining the outcome of presidential elections is central to any model of American government. Previous researchers have found that economic conditions explain a substantial portion of the variation in vote outcomes. We make two contributions to this literature. First, we show that state partisan predisposition is the most important explanatory variable for the period 1972–1992. Several states are simply out of reach for one of the parties, no matter how favorable is the information about their candidate. Second, we find that national economic indicators have an effect on votes that is an order of magnitude larger than state-level aggregates. Presidents who try to curry favor with certain states through pork barrel projects are unlikely to be rewarded with large vote margins. Our model does a reasonable job forecasting the state-level vote for the 1996 election when the actual economic conditions are used as regressors. None the less we are skeptical that these type of models can accurately forecast the Electoral College winner because of the wide confidence intervals on each state's vote forecast and the potential error in predicted economic conditions.     

United We Vote

This paper studies the advantages that a coalition of agents obtain by forming a voting bloc to pool their votes and cast them all together. We identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for an agent to benefit from the formation of the voting bloc, both if the agent is a member of the bloc and if the agent is not part of the bloc. We also determine whether individual agents prefer to participate in or step out of the bloc, and we find the different optimal internal voting rules that aggregate preferences within the coalition.     

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.     

Mixed Motives: An Empirical Analysis of ILO Roll-Call Voting

In this empirical paper, we look at individual voting behaviour of government delegates to the International Labour Organization (ILO). We distinguish between the instrumental motive for voting, which consists in the chance that one's vote may turn the balance in favour of one's preferred outcome, and non-instrumental motives, such as a desire for good reputation. Empirically, the two can be identified because two alternatives, abstaining and not participating in the vote, do not differ in their instrumental value, but are likely to differ with respect to reputation aspects. The model is estimated by a multinomial logit with country-specific unobserved heterogeneity, using roll-call votes on the final passage of ILO conventions from 1977 to 1995. The hypothesis that voting is only instrumental is clearly rejected by the data.     

Non-cooperative bargaining in apex games and the kernel

This paper studies non-cooperative bargaining with random proposers in apex games. Two different protocols are considered: the egalitarian protocol, which selects each player to be the proposer with equal probability, and the proportional protocol, which selects each player with a probability proportional to his number of votes. Expected equilibrium payoffs coincide with the kernel for the grand coalition regardless of the protocol. The equilibrium is in mixed strategies and the indifference conditions can be reinterpreted in the language of the kernel.