Voting on welfare reform Stemming migration, assisting the needy, or promoting economic growth?

This paper examines the influences on voting by members of the House of Representatives on the Carter Administration's welfare reform legislation. The analysis finds some support for the hypothesis that voting by national legislators responded to the potential mobility of welfare recipients from low to high benefit states. Defining the public interest as promoting economic growth and the special interest as increasing redistribution, the results also provide evidence in support of the Stigler hypothesis that politically secure legislators are better able to vote the public, as opposed to the special, interest. Received: July 15, 1998 / Accepted: August 6, 1999     

融资约束视角下终极控股股东对企业风险承担的影响

本文利用我国2006～2014年沪深A股非金融类上市企业数据,研究终极控股股东对企业风险承 担的影响以及融资约束在该影响中的作用。结果表明,控股股东现金流权对企业风险承担的 影响呈U型结构,随现金流权的增大,现金流权对企业风险承担的影响由正转负。就我国市 场而言,控制权与现金流权的分离度对企业风险承担具有负向影响,这种负向影响程度随融 资约束的提高而减弱。     

DPWeVote: differentially private weighted voting protocol for cloud-based decision-making

ABSTRACT

With the advent of Industry 4.0, cloud computing techniques have been increasingly adopted by industry practitioners to achieve better workflows. One important application is cloud-based decision-making, in which multiple enterprise partners need to arrive an agreed decision. Such cooperative decision-making problem is sometimes formed as a weighted voting game, in which enterprise partners express ‘YES/NO’ opinions. Nevertheless, existing cryptographic approaches to Cloud-Based Weighted Voting Game have restricted collusion tolerance and heavily rely on trusted servers, which are not always available. In this work, we consider the more realistic scenarios of having semi-honest cloud server/partners and assuming maximal collusion tolerance. To resolve the privacy issues in such scenarios, the DPWeVote protocol is proposed which incorporates Randomized Response technique and consists the following three phases: the Randomized Weights Collection phase, the Randomized Opinions Collection phase, and the Voting Results Release phase. Experiments on synthetic data have demonstrated that the proposed DPWeVote protocol managed to retain an acceptable utility for decision-making while preserving privacy in semi-honest environment.     

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).     

Weighted representative democracy

We propose a new system of democratic representation. Any voter can choose any legislator as her representative; thus, different legislators can represent different numbers of voters. Decisions in the legislature are made by weighted majority voting, where the weight of each legislator is determined by the number of voters she represents. We show that, if the size of the electorate is very large, then with very high probability, the decisions obtained in the legislature agree with those which would have been reached by a popular referendum decided by simple majority vote.     

Voter turnout and government's legitimate mandate

The paper studies a group-mobilization model of costly voting in which citizens care about the legitimate mandate of the government formed by the winning group. This, as a function of the electorate's voting behavior, depends on both the margin of victory and the total turnout rate. Citizens prefer a high mandate when their own group forms the government but a low one if the government is formed by an opposing group. As such, the eventual losing group faces a trade-off: a higher participation from its members decreases the margin of victory but increases the total turnout. In equilibrium, a second fundamental trade-off arises, which overturns the supposed positive relationship between turnout and mandate: as the total turnout becomes more important for the government's mandate, the first decreases but the second strengthens. The key mechanism at play is a shift in the relative participation of the two groups, which favors the majority and raises its margin of victory, thus yielding a bandwagon effect. The implications for the evolution of turnout and the occurrence of election boycotts are discussed.     

New methodology for calculating cost-efficiency of different ways of voting: is internet voting cheaper?

ABSTRACT

New ways of voting in elections are being sought by electoral administrations worldwide who want to reverse declining voter turnouts without increasing electoral budgets. This paper presents a novel approach to cost accounting for multi-channel elections based on local elections in Estonia. By doing so, it addresses an important gap in the academic literature in this field. The authors confirm that internet voting was most cost-efficient voting channel offered to Estonian voters.     

Intergovernmental transfers and political competition measured by pivotal probability - Evidence from Hungary

I estimate the effects of political competition on the allocation of intergovernmental transfers to Hungarian municipalities between 1998 and 2006. The intergovernmental transfers were intended to finance schooling, elder care, and administrative needs in municipalities. Rather than use closeness of the dominant blocks' vote share, which is the standard measure of political competition, I instead employ (Myerson, 2000)'s pivotal probabilities, calculated at the municipality level. As a result, the number of voters, in addition to the vote difference, is taken into account when describing political competition at the municipal level. I argue that under mixed-member proportional systems, as well as under proportional systems in general, pivotal probability reflects the political reality better than closeness can. I find evidence that swing municipalities in villages are targeted and, ceteris paribus, that poorer regions receive larger transfer amounts than other areas.     

Equity‐based incentives and shareholder say‐on‐pay

We study the relationship between CEO pay‐performance sensitivity, pay‐risk sensitivity, and shareholder voting outcomes as part of the “say‐on‐pay” provision of the 2010 US Dodd‐Frank Act. Consistent with our hypothesis, we provide evidence that shareholders tend to approve of compensation packages that are more sensitive to changes in stock price (pay‐performance sensitivity). Our findings are consistent with theoretical predictions that outside owners approve of equity incentives as a means of aligning managers' interests with those of shareholders. We also document that future changes to equity‐based incentives are related to voting outcomes and that shareholders incorporate CFO incentives into their votes. Collectively, these results provide evidence of the importance of equity‐based incentives from the perspective of those most concerned with firm value and of the effectiveness of say‐on‐pay as a governance mechanism.     

REMARKS ON A PROCEDURAL CONDITION FOR THE VOTING PARADOX

Schwartz [A Procedural Condition Necessary and Sufficient for Cyclic Social Preference, J. Econ. Theory 137 (2007), 688–695] provides a generalization of the voting paradox by using the impotence‐partition condition. This paper aims to clarify his result by providing several remarks. We show that a main result of Schwartz can be strengthened by replacing strong Pareto by weak Pareto. We also discuss how the impotence partition is related to the standard concept of decisiveness, which is widely employed in the literature on social choice.