Between liberalism and democracy

We study and characterize axiomatically a class of voting rules, called consent rules, that incorporate aspects of majoritarianism and liberalism. An outcome of the vote specifies who among the voters are eligible to a certain right or qualification. Each outcome serves also as a permissible ballot. Consent rules are parameterized by the weights given to individuals in determining their own qualification. In one of these rules, the liberal rule, each individual's qualification is determined by her. In other rules, an individual's qualification requires social consent in various degrees. We also show the relation between self-determination and the liberal rule.     

On the informational efficiency of simple scoring rules

We study information aggregation in large elections. With two candidates, efficient information aggregation is possible (e.g., Feddersen and Pesendorfer [5], [6] and [7]). We show that this result does not extend to elections with more than two candidates. We study a class of simple scoring rules in voting games with Poisson population uncertainty and three candidates. No simple scoring rule aggregates information efficiently, even if preferences are dichotomous and a Condorcet winner always exists. We introduce a weaker criterion of informational efficiency that requires a voting rule to have at least one efficient equilibrium. Only approval voting satisfies this criterion.     

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.     

Voting blocs, party discipline and party formation

I study the strategic incentives to coordinate votes in an assembly. Coalitions form voting blocs, acting as single players and affecting the policy outcome. In an assembly with two exogenous parties I show how the incentives to accept party discipline depend on the types of the agents, the sizes of the parties, and the rules the blocs use to aggregate preferences. In a game of fully endogenous party formation, I find sufficient conditions for the existence of equilibria with one bloc, two blocs, and multiple blocs.     

STRATEGIC CANDIDACY AND SINGLE‐PEAKEDNESS*

In elections, the voting outcomes are affected by strategic entries of candidates. We study a class of voting rules immune to strategic candidacy. Dutta et al. (2001 ) show that such rules satisfying unanimity are dictatorial if all orderings of candidates are admissible for voters’ preferences. When voters’ preferences are single‐peaked over a political spectrum, there exist non‐dictatorial rules immune to strategic candidacy. An example is the rule selecting the m‐th peak from the left among the peaks of voters’ preferences, where m is any natural number no more than the number of voters. We show that immunity from strategic candidacy with basic axioms fully characterizes the family of the m‐th leftmost peak rules.     

Should we write prenuptial contracts?

A successful marriage requires for both parties to make investments in their relationship and marital assets. How such assets would be divided if and when the parties divorce is an important factor determining each party's ex ante investment incentives. Using the incomplete contracting approach, we characterize the optimal asset division rule, one that provides the parties with the best investment incentives. We then discuss the circumstances under which the spouses would agree, in equilibrium, to contract out state-imposed rules governing the allocation of marital assets upon divorce. We conclude by exploring the implications of our results in the context of various asset division rules currently discussed by policy-makers.     

PUBLIC GOOD PROVISION WITH CONSTITUTIONAL CONSTRAINT

This article studies the public good provision problem, in which the principal faces a constitutional constraint in the sense that in order for a public good provision mechanism to be implemented, it must first be approved by agents under a prespecified voting rule. I find that as long as the voting rule is not the unanimity rule, the principal can propose a mechanism such that first‐best efficiency of provision of the public good is achieved. I also consider various constraints, such as prohibition of discriminatory mechanisms and the existence of vote buying, and discuss optimal voting rules in these situations.     

Deliberative voting

We analyze a model of jury decision making in which jurors deliberate before casting their votes. We consider a wide range of voting institutions and show that deliberations render these equivalent with respect to the sequential equilibrium outcomes they generate. In particular, in the context of a jury setup, all voting rules excluding the two types of unanimity rules (one requiring a unanimous consensus to acquit, one requiring a unanimous consensus to convict) induce the same set of equilibria outcomes. We show the robustness of our results with respect to several restrictions on communication protocols and jurors’ strategies. Furthermore, we demonstrate that our observations extend to practically all of the voting structures commonly studied in the voting literature. The paper suggests the importance of accounting for communication in models of collective choice.     

Too afraid to vote? The effects of COVID-19 on voting behaviour

This paper studies the causal effect of local exposure to COVID-19 on voting behaviour and electoral outcomes using evidence from the regional elections held in Spain on 12 July 2020. Exploiting the variation in exposure to COVID-19 and using a difference-in-differences identification strategy, we show that turnout was between 2.6 and 5.1 percentage points lower in municipalities that experienced positive cases of COVID-19. In addition, the results show a substantial increase in the probability of voting for nationalist parties. We discuss the idea of perceived fear being the potential mechanism driving our results.     

A theory on party discipline and vote switching by legislators

We develop a new theory of vote switching by legislators that defect from party line voting. In our model, ideological candidates select their party label and, once elected, vote in parliament. Political parties select their policy platform as to maximize votes while preserving their candidates’ loyalty. We find that legislators that defect from party line voting arise within the majority party. Besides, the more legislators care about their ideology and the less about their own reputation, the more they defect from party line voting. Interestingly, when a party has larger electoral advantage and its candidates sufficiently care about their reputation, such a party can propose a more polarized policy to avoid party defectors. Our model suggests that polarization incentivizes loyalty. Finally, we discuss the robustness of our results in multi-party systems and multi-constituency systems.     

Bargaining in committees as an extension of Nash's bargaining theory

This paper addresses the following issue: if a set of agents bargain on a set of feasible alternatives ‘in the shadow’ of a voting rule, that is, any agreement can be enforced if a ‘winning coalition’ supports it, what general agreements are likely to arise? In other words: what influence can the voting rule used to settle (possibly nonunanimous) agreements have on the outcome of consensus? We model the situation as an extension of the Nash bargaining problem in which an arbitrary voting rule replaces unanimity. In this setting a natural extension of Nash's solution is characterized.     

The Disunity of Unanimity

Unanimity is the optimal voting rule in a world of zero transactions costs, when side payments are impossible. When side payments are available and transactions costs are zero, the voting rule is irrelevant to the ultimate outcome. In the more realistic situation where side payments are allowed but transactions costs are positive, a unanimity voting rule creates situations where the collective choice may fail a proposed measure even if all members favor the measure in principle. This evidences a disunity between unanimity rules and unanimous outcomes. Constitutional design should focus on rules leading to unanimous outcomes, as opposed to unanimity rules.     

Pareto violations of parliamentary voting systems

It has been known for a long time that many binary voting rules can select a Pareto dominated outcome, that is an outcome such that there exists some other alternative which is preferred by every voter. In this paper, we show that some of these rules can select an outcome Pareto dominated in a much stronger sense. Furthermore, our main results are concerned with the evaluation of the likelihood of Pareto dominated outcomes under four social choice rules commonly used in Parliaments or in committees. Given a set of four alternatives and a set of n individuals, we assume anonymous profiles and using analytical methods we compute the proportion of profiles at which the Pareto criterion is violated. Our results show that one should not be especially worried about the existence of the possibility as such. We are grateful to two anonymous referees for very helpful remarks and suggestions.     

Emigrants’ missing votes

What are the causal effects of emigration on election outcomes in the country of origin? Large emigration of high-skilled emigrants can lead to changes in the distribution of political preferences, which affect voting outcomes. Using administrative migration and voting data, we show that emigration from Poland following its accession to the European Union in 2004 caused an increase in vote shares for right-wing parties, while decreasing the vote share for left-wing parties due to emigrants’ missing left-leaning votes. To account for endogenous migration patterns, we construct an innovative instrument that measures the distance to the closest open EU border. Our results highlight that emigration enhances stayers’ trust in right-wing governments and increases stayers’ voting for parties with pro-European positions. Exploiting a change in voting rules over time allows to disentangle different mechanisms. These results have important implications for the design of voting policies.     

Waiting to settle: Multilateral bargaining with subjective biases

We study multilateral bargaining games where agents disagree over their bargaining power. We show that if agents are extremely optimistic, there may be costly delays in an arbitrarily long finite game but if optimism is moderate, all sufficiently long games end in immediate agreement. We show that the game with extreme optimism is highly unstable in the finite-horizon, and we examine the ramifications of this instability on the infinite-horizon problem. Finally, we consider other voting rules, and show that the majority-rule may be more efficient than the unanimity rule when agents are optimistic.     

Evaluative voting or classical voting rules: Does it make a difference? Empirical evidence for consensus among voting rules

We provide empirical evidence for Tullock's claim (Tullock (1967, 1981)) that many of the problems known from social choice literature do not show up in practice. In particular, even though theoretically the use of different voting rules can lead to very different outcomes, there appears to be rather high consensus among voting rules when applied to real-world preference data. In addition, the famous and widely studied problem of majority cycles seems to be of little significance in practice. In this study, based on data collected in an online-survey in connection with the 2015 parliament election in the Austrian federal state of Styria, we confirm these findings to a high degree. Our analysis is based on an approach using a nonparametric bootstrap and includes various forms of evaluative voting (which has recently received increasing attention).     

Party Formation and Policy Outcomes under Different Electoral Systems

I introduce a model of representative democracy with strategic parties, strategic candidates, strategic voters and multiple districts. If policy preferences are similar across districts and not too concentrated within districts, then the number of effective parties is larger under proportional representation (PR) than under plurality, and both electoral systems determine the median voter's preferred policy. However, for more asymmetric distributions of preferences the Duvergerian predictions can be reversed , and the policy outcome with PR is more moderate than the one with plurality. Sincere voting induces more party formation, and strategic voting can be observed more often under PR.     

The Costs of Implementing the Majority Principle: The Golden Voting Rule

In a context of constitutional choice of a voting rule, this paper presents an economic analysis of scoring rules that identifies the golden voting rule under the impartial culture assumption. This golden rule depends on the weights β and (1−β) assigned to two types of costs: the cost of majority decisiveness (‘tyranny’) and the cost of the ‘erosion’ in the majority principle. Our first main result establishes that in voting contexts where the number of voters n is typically considerably larger than the number of candidates k, the golden voting rule is the inverse plurality rule for almost any positive β. Irrespective of n and k, the golden voting rule is the inverse plurality rule if β ≥ 1/2 .. This hitherto almost unnoticed rule outperforms any other scoring rule in eliminating majority decisiveness. The golden voting rule is, however, the plurality rule, the most widely used voting rule that does not allow even the slightest ‘erosion’ in the majority principle, when β=0. Our second main result establishes that for sufficiently “small size” voting bodies, the set of potential golden rules consists at most of just three rules: the plurality rule, the Borda rule and the inverse plurality rule. On the one hand, this finding provides a new rationalization to the central role the former two rules play in practice and in the voting theory literature. On the other hand, it provides further support to the inverse plurality rule; not only that it is the golden rule in voting contexts, it also belongs, together with the plurality rule and the Borda method of counts, to the “exclusive” set of potential golden voting rules in small committees. We are indebted to Jim Buchanan, Amichai Glazer, Noa Nitzan, Ken Shepsle, and an anonymous referee for their useful comments.     

Representative consumer's risk aversion and efficient risk-sharing rules

We study the representative consumer's risk attitude and efficient risk-sharing rules in a single-period, single-good economy in which consumers have homogeneous probabilistic beliefs but heterogeneous risk attitudes. We prove that if all consumers have convex absolute risk tolerance, so must the representative consumer. We also identify a relationship between the curvature of an individual consumer's individual risk sharing rule and his absolute cautiousness, the first derivative of absolute risk-tolerance. Furthermore, we discuss some consequences of these results and refinements of these results for the class of HARA utility functions.     

Sharing the surplus: An extension of the Shapley value for environments with externalities

Economic activities, both on the macro and micro level, often entail wide-spread externalities. This in turn leads to disputes regarding the compensation levels to the various parties affected. We propose a method of deciding upon the distribution of the gains (costs) of cooperation in the presence of externalities when forming the grand coalition is efficient. We show that any sharing rule satisfying efficiency, linearity, dummy player and a strong symmetry axioms can be obtained through an average game. Adding an additional axiom, we identify one unique rule satisfying these properties.