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The importance of voting in undisputed, yet scholarly works attempting to understand the causes and consequences of incorrect voting are relatively scarce. Building on the works of Lau and Redlawsk (1997, 2006; Lau et al., 2008), I design and implement a new survey method measuring incorrect voting I call Self-identified Incorrect Voting (SIV). This method allows survey respondents to determine for themselves if they voted incorrectly in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. I conducted the SIV survey of a national sample of voters and use the results to test traditional hypotheses regarding the value of partisanship and the economy as cues to help low-information voters behave in the same manner as high-information voters.

Using a sample of non-U.S. firms from 43 countries, we investigate whether laws and regulations as well as votes cast by U.S. institutional investors are consistent with an effective shareholder voting process. We find that laws and regulations allow for meaningful votes to be cast as shareholder voting is both mandatory and binding for important elections. For votes cast, we find there is greater dissent voting when investors fear expropriation. Further, greater dissent voting is associated with higher director turnover and more M&A withdrawals. Our results suggest that shareholder voting is an effective mechanism for exercising governance around the world.

Recent studies in political psychology report a significant association between personality traits and ordinary citizens’ attitudes and behaviors in the political arena. A growing body of literature examines the influence of personality on individuals’ attachment to a political party and vote choice in electoral settings. In line with these studies, we analyze the relationship between personality traits and “correct voting”, i.e., the extent to which citizens vote in accordance with their own preferences and values. Using a large-scale national survey fielded in the context of the 2008 presidential election, we find that, after controlling for well-known predictors of correct voting, some of personality traits not only exert a direct influence on correct voting, but also moderate the effect of strength of party identification, a well-established determinant of correct voting. These findings provide new evidence for the idea that individual differences such as dispositional personality traits are deeply intertwined with both vote choice and democratic representation.

It is sometimes claimed that compulsory voting violates a particular right not to vote. For some, this assumed right is as fundamental as the right to vote. The existence of such a right, however, has attracted little sustained scholarly attention. This article explores from a political theory perspective whether the alleged ‘right not to vote’ is deserving the same legal and moral protection as the right to vote. I argue on two broad grounds that it is not. First, not all rights are capable of being legally waived and voting is one of them. Second, voting is a right but it is also a duty; it is a duty-right. Therefore, even though many people do fail to vote, doing so does not seem to constitute the exercise of any particular right, nor should it be legally recognised as such.有人认为强制性投票侵犯了不投票的权利。对于很多人来说，不投票的权利跟投票的权利同等重要。不过这种权利却未得到学术界的持续关注。本文从政治学的角度探讨了所谓的“不投票权”是否应像投票权一样享有法律上和道德上的保护。笔者基于更宽泛的理由认为不应当。首先，并非所有权利都是可以在法律上免除的，投票权即是。其次，投票是权利，也是义务；是权利—义务。所以，尽管许多人没有投票，但这并不构成某种权利，法律上也不应被视作权利。

In 1925 a new electoral system was introduced in Chile. This reform changed the electoral formula from a cumulative voting system to a proportional one (d'Hondt) and established new rules about district magnitude and form of voting. It has been argued that this reform was motivated by the emergence of new parties or the expansion of the electorate. This article offers an alternative explanation: in the case of Chile, the main reason for the electoral reform was the parties' need to solve problems of strategic coordination stemming from the characteristics of the Chilean cumulative voting system. In this context, the Chilean case shows that there are many routes to proportionality.

How are elections affected by the votes of people living abroad? The majority of states now allow extra-territorial voting in some form, but the research literature on this topic remains underdeveloped. Moreover, even though extra-territorial voting raises issues about the relationship between territory and political obligation that are relevant to political geographers, political geography has been under-represented in discussions on the topic. Against this background, this research examines a century of overseas voting impacts in New Zealand, a country with an unusually long recorded history of such activity. The study identifies three types of extra-territorial voting impact over the period 1914-2011, referred to as swings, interregnums and feedback effects.

Transparency of bank accounts, nowadays, is an undeniable necessity, but no one denies that definite transparency throughout election process is not realized thus far in the world. This calls for fundamental changes in traditional electronic election methods. The new method must close the way for any complaints by the candidate as to the voting process as the public completely trusts in the voting mechanism. Synchronizing voting and votes counting improves the public's trust in the results of election. The proposed secure room-corridor of electronic voting employs election watchers and reports real time results of election along with observance of confidentiality of the votes.

This paper addresses the paradox of voter turnout, wherein observed voting participation rates are far greater than what rational choice theory would predict. Voters face multiple voting choices, stochastic voting costs, and candidates offering different economic platforms. A combination of two approaches attempts to resolve this paradox: quantal response equilibrium (QRE) analysis, which introduces noise into the decision-making process, and the possibility of ethical (altruism-motivated) voting. A series of laboratory experiments empirically tests the predictions of the resulting model. Participants in the experiments are also given opportunities for communicating online with their immediate neighbors, in order to enhance the chances that subjects would realize the possibility of ethical voting. The results show that ethical voting occurs but gains momentum only in the presence of a vocal advocate and even then it mostly dissipated by the second half of the session. The QRE-based model was able to explain some but not all of the overvoting that was observed, relative to the Nash equilibrium prediction. There is evidence to suggest that communication via the chat feature generated some of the voting and also some of the ethical voting.

Unlike the classical approach to voting power, the approach presented in this paper makes a distinction between a voter's winning and blocking power and relates the latter kind of power to the number of small-size minimal blocking coalitions the voter can form with other voters. It is shown that the concept of blocking sheds light on the designing of voting systems for EU Council of Ministers from the very beginning to the Lisbon treaty.

This Special Issue, ‘Voters and Voting in Multilevel Systems', is a contribution to a better understanding of the functioning and logics of the present-day German electoral system, but its findings and consequences stretch beyond the German case. After all, Germany is ideally suited for studying multilevel voting and the interdependences and mutual repercussions of multilayer electoral systems. The Special Issue takes the challenges and changes in voting behaviour as a starting point and searches for links and causal relationships between levels. Overall, it has two major goals: first, to examine how (increasing) volatility in voting behaviour and declining participation rates manifest themselves at all layers of the multilevel system, possibly amplifying each other; second, to turn the usual perspective on its head by examining the impact of second-order elections and vote choices on parties' fortunes and electoral outcomes at the national level.

I develop a hybrid of direct democracy and representative democracy in which each citizen may vote directly on each issue, or delegate his vote on any issue to a representative (that is, a proxy) of his own choosing. I construct both an axiomatic argument for such a system and an argument based on its ability to ameliorate the information problems inherent in both direct and representative democracy. I also propose practical measures for implementation, including new variations on existing proxy system proposals. These new variations include a ‘Dodgsonesque’ procedure, a proportional agenda-setting procedure, a provision for virtual committees, and a provision for continual consideration of issues.

Critics of the expressive account of voting have argued that it is inconsistent with strategic voting. Since there is strong evidence that people vote strategically, this has been taken to show that many voters are at least partially instrumentally motivated. This paper argues that strategic voting in the relevant sense is consistent with entirely expressive political motivation. Building on an earlier suggestion by Geoffrey Brennan, I model voters as expressively valuing ideological position as well as the strategic pursuit of expressively-defined preferences. This model predicts strategic voting without instrumental preferences entering the voter’s calculus at all. I also suggest that expressive preferences for strategic behaviour can be usefully analysed in terms of dispositional choice.

In 2012, Chile passed a major election law reform to adopt automatic registration and voluntary voting. Prior to this, Chile, like most Latin American countries, had a compulsory voting law. With this reform, Chile became one of only a few countries to ever move from compulsory to voluntary voting. Since the new law came into effect, two elections have taken place. The purpose of this research note is to review registration and turnout patterns in comparative historical terms, discuss the pros and cons of the election law reform, and to evaluate the 2012 and 2013 election outcomes with respect to voter turnout and election results. We describe the background of voter registration and turnout under the old system; discuss the debate surrounding the election law reform; and review the impact of the reform on turnout patterns.

In 2012, about one-third of voters with disabilities reported having issues when voting in a polling place. Although the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was passed in 2002, it is clear that there is room for improvement within the domain of accessible voting. Prime III is a voting technology that addresses many issues that plague other accessible voting systems. By addressing the needs of different communities, Prime III has become a ballot marking system that allows all voters to vote on one machine. This demonstration will showcase the accessibility features of Prime III and how it can be used in elections.

This article examines the evolution of electoral qualifications in Russia and European countries in the first third of the 20th century. The analysis of restrictions on voting in pre-revolutionary and Soviet Russia, as well as other countries, is made with reference to a wide range of sources: legislative acts, official statistics, and unpublished archival documents kept in the central and regional Russian archives. The author analyses typical documents (administrative documents, minutes and resolutions, reports, memoranda, information documents) from the funds of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, and the Central Committee of the Party, which helps her determine the number of persons subject to the deprivation of rights, the functions of qualifications in the Soviet electoral system, and the features of their application. Additionally, the author compares Russian and foreign voting qualifications, which clarifies the similarities and peculiar features of their respective electoral systems. It is demonstrated that the voting qualifications of pre-revolutionary Russia, though having certain characteristics of their own, were otherwise consistent with the main trends in the development of the electoral systems of the European states of the early 20th century, while Soviet voting qualifications were among the most original ones in the world and considerably differed from electoral systems elsewhere. Soviet voting qualifications did not comply with the established principles of suffrage limitations around the world. The Bolsheviks radically democratised and abolished the generally accepted qualifications and, simultaneously, introduced restrictions untypical of other electoral systems (employment restrictions making it impossible for the unemployed to vote). Voter eligibility requirements were not only different from the global ones in their content but functionally too. The body responsible for imposing electoral restrictions in Soviet Russia performed a number of functions that were not characteristic of an electoral system in general. Instead of preventing the institutionally disaffected groups from taking part in voting, it was used an instrument of social and political pressure on the economically active part of society, becoming a significant part of the discrimination policy of the state. This conditioned the connection of suffrage with limitations of a social and economic nature., Предметом исследования является эволюция избирательных цензов в России и европейских странах в первой трети XX в. Ограничения избирательных прав в дореволюционной и советской России, а также в зарубежных странах изучаются на основе широкого круга источников: законодательных актов, материалов официальной статистики, неопубликованных документов из центральных и региональных российских архивов. Анализ традиционных для делопроизводства государственной и партийной власти документов из различных фондов (распорядительных, протокольно-резолютивных, отчетных, докладных, информационных) позволяет определить численность лиц, подлежавших лишению прав, функции цензов в советской избирательной системе, особенности их применения. Компаративистский анализ российских и зарубежных цензов конкретизирует их общие и специфические черты, роль в избирательных системах. Показано, что избирательные цензы дореволюционной России, обладая рядом особенностей, соответствовали европейским электоральным практикам начала XX в. и выборным традициям России. Советские избирательные цензы разрывали сложившиеся принципы установления ограничений избирательных прав в мире. Большевики радикально демократизировали и отменили общепринятые в электоральной практике цензы, одновременно ввели ограничения прав, не свойственные другим избирательным системам (трудовой ценз). Избирательные цензы, помимо содержательных, имели значимые функциональные различия с мировой электоральной практикой. Институт лишения избирательных прав в Советской России выполнял не свойственные избирательной системе функции: вместо превентивного отстранения от участия в выборах нелояльных власти групп он использовался как способ социально-экономического давления на хозяйственно активные слои населения, став важной частью дискриминационной политики государства. Это обусловило взаимосвязь избирательных прав с ограничениями социально-экономического характера.

The existing (election) voting systems, e.g., representative democracy, have many limitations and often fail to serve the best interest of the people in collective decision making. To address this issue, the concept of liquid democracy has been emerging as an alternative decision-making model to make better use of "the wisdom of crowds". Very recently, a few liquid democracy implementations, e.g. Google Votes and Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO), are released; however, those systems only focus on the functionality aspect, as no privacy/anonymity is considered. In this work, we, for the first time, provide a rigorous study of liquid democracy under the Universal Composability (UC) frame- work. In the literature, liquid democracy was achieved via two separate stages -- delegation and voting. We propose an efficient liquid democracy e-voting scheme that uni es these two stages. At the core of our design is a new voting concept called statement voting, which can be viewed as a natural extension of the conventional voting approaches. We remark that our statement voting can be extended to enable more complex voting and generic ledger-based non-interactive multi-party computation. We believe that the statement voting concept opens a door for constructing a new class of e-voting schemes.

We examine whether parties punish politicians who vote against the party line in roll-call votes. Using data of German members of parliament (MPs) over the legislative period 2009-2013, we take into account that the effect of punishment differs along the list of candidates because a candidate is punished more when he loses positions at the threshold of promising list positions. The data set includes the voting behavior of 257 MPs in 218 roll-call votes. Our results do not show that parties account for the voting behavior by punishing politicians who have voted against the party line. Political parties may attract different groups of voters by tolerating politicians who vote according to their own credo. Qualities other than the voting behavior seem to matter to political parties when nominating candidates.

Australia is often characterized as “a democratic laboratory,” where a wide variety of electoral systems have been designed and implemented. Australia gave the world “the Australian ballot” (or secret ballot), and it is one of the few countries to operate an enforced system of compulsory voting. This chapter examines the evolution of the electoral systems in the lower House of Representatives and in the upper house, the Senate. Particular attention is given to the design of the Senate electoral system, and to the changes that were implemented at the 2016 election to eliminate the proliferation of “micro parties.” The development of compulsory voting is also outlined, and its consequences for the party system evaluated. Finally, the chapter discusses the major challenges to reform of the electoral system.

The paper presents a transformation from simple “yes-no” cooperative games to simple cooperative games where players have more than two actions available to them by introducing abstentions into a yes-no voting system. The results obtained up to now are rather pessimistic (Felsenthal and Machover, Power, voting, and voting power: 30 years after, Part II (2013) [6], even call them “the curious case of the absent abstention”). We discuss in this paper the relation between the right of veto, weights of the players and quotas. Our results clarify some general properties and enable an a priori analysis to gain a better understanding of the decision-making mechanism of such decisive bodies. Examples of the United Nations Security Council and Polish president-parliament cohabitation are used to illustrate our discussion.

In this paper a network-oriented computational model is presented for voting intentions over time specifically for the race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the 2016 US presidential election. The focus was on the role of social and mass communication media and the statements made by Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton during their speeches. The aim was to investigate the influence on the voting intentions and the final voting. Sentiment analysis was performed to check whether the statements were high or low in language intensity. Simulation experiments using parameter tuning were compared to real world data (3 election polls until the 8th of November).

A system of Internet voting with fully open to inspection and testing software. The act of voting in this system can be carried out using any device with Internet access. This can be any type of computer, tablet, smartphone, or TV with SmartTV function without using any additional software or hardware. In order to ensure the confidence of the voters the opportunity to monitor the performance of the system in real time to any interested party. As a potential security violators of the voting process are considered by all participants in the electoral process, including personnel, which is responsible for certain functions or areas of the voting system . This ensures the safety of the votes from the disclosure, and the accuracy of the counting of votes - against abuse. It proposed a method of voting in this system, which provides for the possibility of free will of voters subject to the availability of illegal influence factors such as bribery, intimidation or military pressure. Application of the proposed method eliminates the possibility of obtaining information about the result of the vote of any particular voter, because of what becomes meaningless use of illegal influence on voters.

This research study seeks to find out about the editorial cartoons and their impact on voting behavior of university students. The problem statement is that whether there is an impact on voting behavior of university students by reading editorial cartoons of Sri Lankan newspapers. This research is based on voters, who used their voting power in Presidential election which held on 8 th of January, 2015. The focus group discussion performed to collect the data required. The research found that the undergraduate students were less affected by the editorial cartoons during the presidential election in 2015. Majority of the students irrespective with ethnicity and gender did not believe editorial cartoon and consumed to entertain the content of the cartoons. Less number of voters believed that editorial cartoon plays a major role in determining voting behavior by shaping the political agenda by focusing upon candidates and political issues and reinforcing the voting behavior.

One of the ways that citizens and elites orient themselves to politics is in reference to a Left-Right vocabulary. Left and Right, respectively, refer to a specific set of progressive and conservative policy preferences and political goals. Thus, Left-Right becomes a framework for positioning oneself, political figures, and political parties into a common framework. Most citizens identify themselves in Left-Right terms and their distribution of these orientations vary across nations. These orientations arise both from long-term societal influences and from the short-term issues of the day. Most people also place political parties in Left-Right terms. This leads citizens to use Left-Right comparisons as an important factor in their voting choice, although this impact varies considerably across nations. Most parties attract voters that broadly share their Left-Right orientations.

This chapter reviews work on portfolio-maximizing strategic voting in parliamentary systems. It first offers a typology of strategies, sorting them into mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive categories. This helps organize the literature and identify gaps. It then considers the equilibrium levels of portfolio-maximizing voting. Taking a game-theoretic perspective (where most of the literature takes a decision-theoretic approach) helps clarify how much strategic voting should be expected and also the interconnections between different varieties of strategic behavior. Finally, the chapter reviews the empirical evidence on the incidence of portfolio-maximizing voting, concluding with some thoughts on fruitful ways forward for future research.

Voting right is citizen’s constitutional rights. There is nothing that can obscure it, not to mention negate it, as long as it is not against the moral, religious, public stability and security values. The action to negate the voting rights is an act of dismissal of democratic constitutional values. Indeed, the democratic values strongly upheld the citizens’ rights, including the voting rights. The correlation between the voting rights and the general election administration is a synergic correlation to create conducive election as mandated by the constitution. Administration role should not have been an obstacle for upholding the constitutional democratic values, rather, it becomes a filter in regulating each citizen in using their voting rights to ensure the legal certainty, either from technical aspects, which is the accurate ballot counting, or from substantive aspect that is to ensure the legal certainty in conducting the accountable general election. In deciding the voters, several things should be prioritized such as first, the administrative management of general election related to the population administration; and, second, the voting rights transformed into the List of Fixed Voters (DPT). Administrative data of population is a baseline data and the data source for establishing the List of Fixed Voters (DPT).Keywords: Constitutional democracy, general election, voters’ administration, and rights, the list of fixed voter.

Can the principle of secret suffrage be ensured when voters are offered the possibility to cast their votes using internet voting? With the steady introduction of different forms of remote electronic voting since 2000, it has become apparent that internet voting fails at providing the privacy guarantees offered by traditional paper-based voting systems. Against this assumption, the current proposal suggests reviewing the traditional configuration of the principle of vote secrecy. With this in mind, the proposal will: (1) assess current accepted standards on voters' anonymity for traditional and internet-based voting systems; (2) evaluate the core elements of lawful relaxations to the principle of secret suffrage, and especially those traditionally associated to different forms of remote voting, and assess whether they can be applied to internet voting; and (3) study how current technical developments in the field of elections (and more broadly, in the field of e-governance and e-democracy) may result in further relaxations of the principle of secret suffrage in the future. Overall, the goal of the proposal is to approach the principle of secret suffrage against the specificities of internet voting and, instead of evaluating electronic voting systems using traditional standards for voters' privacy and anonymity, evaluate how specific proposals aimed at ensuring voters' secrecy in internet voting comply with the very end that the principle of secret suffrage is aimed at protecting, namely: voters' freedom.

Political participation on the issue of climate change can encompass many different forms of individual and collective actions designed to affect governmental policies. At the most basic level, issue-specific political participation occurs when individuals directly attempt to influence governmental actors or policies on climate change—most notably by voting, but also through donating money and communicating with public officials. These types of participation tend to be relatively rare, limited to a small subset of deeply committed individuals. In contrast, personal action on climate change is more widely dispersed, especially if one includes impact-oriented actions (e.g., actions that influence the environment but are primarily undertaken for other reasons, like convenience or saving money) rather than purely intention-based actions, which occur when individuals adopt behaviors with the goal of addressing climate change. Additionally, opportunities to engage in expressive participation, largely online, create new spaces for individuals to build networks to engage in political action, as well as potentially to reach unengaged groups that are less likely to seek out information on the issue. A number of forces can contribute to whether an individual chooses to participate on the issue of climate change. Individual characteristics, like perceptions of impersonal and personal risks associated with climate change, knowledge of the issues, and environmental values all tend to produce people more likely to participate—especially when these attitudes become part of an individual’s identity as an opinion leader or activist. As a global issue, social norms play a particularly powerful role; when individuals believe others support and are likely to take action themselves, it tends to foster a sense of efficacy that such behaviors will be effective in producing change. Individual choices about media sources also intersect with media coverage and framing of the issue to influence perceptions of the issue and likelihood of taking action. Such media framing can exacerbate or mitigate the heightened political polarization on the issue of climate change that has erected barriers to effective political action in many democratic societies in recent years, most notably in the United States. New forms of political participation may create opportunities to encourage more participation on the issue of climate change, but they also raise ethical questions about inequality and participatory divides that privilege some groups over others.

The 2014 Referendum on Scottish independence raised many issues about the\ud future of Scotland. It also produced an innovation as regards the electoral\ud process by making 16 years the minimum age of participation. This article\ud examines issues surrounding the voting age and draws on a schools-based\ud study, which shed light on teacher and pupil opinion about this lower than\ud usual threshold for voting. It is also concerned with how schools cover the\ud teaching of politics and prepared students for the Referendum debate within a\ud context of expected neutrality on a highly divisive matter. Some implications of\ud extending the lower voting age for future elections are discussed.

Connections between the economy and vote are commonly invoked to evaluate political accountability in representative democracies. A principal motivation for studying economic voting lies in its value as a gauge of whether democracy works or not. In recent years, however, researchers have cast doubt on the assertion that economic conditions influence voters’ evaluations of political incumbents. Criticisms hail from several directions. Some, adopting a cross-national perspective, cite the instability problem as evidence against economic voting’s existence. That is, variance in the economy-vote relationship across different national contexts is sufficiently large so as to undermine claims that the economy registers a systematic effect. Other critics charge that the electorate lacks sufficient knowledge to incorporate economic conditions in their decisions at the polls. Still others remind us not to mistake correlation for causation. They charge that the voters’ perceptions of how well the economy is performing are viewed through a pre-existing partisan lens. All told, these and other reservations cast doubt on the use of economic voting as a means to evaluate accountability and, in turn, democratic performance. These charges against the fidelity of economic voting require further examination. Rather than join a growing chorus of observers concluding that the economic vote is a chimera, this piece posits that recent critiques should push us to reconceive rather than discredit economic voting. Recent work in psychology and behavioral economics provides a basis for constructive and meaningful reinterpretations of the economy’s influence on voter decisions. These new directions include an emphasis on framing effects—be it on the part of strategic elites or from the media, an emphasis on what voters know about the economy, and a wider consideration of just which “economy” matters to which set of voters. While many in number, each of these new directions advance understanding by embodying deeper conceptions of voters and elected officials.

To understand voting behaviour, we must consider voters' emotions and their interaction with electoral arrangements and the complex functions elections serve in democracies. We can then optimize voting via electoral ergonomics — the design of electoral arrangements that consider voters' bodies and minds.

We develop and test a theory of voting and turnout decisions that integrates self-interest, social preferences, and expressive motives. Our model implies that if pocketbook benefits are relevant, voters either perceive their impact on the outcome to be non-negligible, or expressive motivations do not play a role in the decision on how to vote. Conversely, if own pocketbook benefits do not explain voting, then voting is expressive. If the perceived probability of being pivotal is non-negligible, social preferences and expressive concerns are observationally equivalent. Our empirical analysis studies collective choices which are analogous to decisions on local public goods. We consider referenda among university students on whether to collectively purchase deeply discounted flat rate tickets for public transportation and cultural amenities. Individual us- age data allow quantifying the monetary benefits associated with each ticket. As voters had precise information on the individual costs and benefits, our setting comprises a real-world laboratory of direct democracy. We find that monetary benefits strongly influence participation and voting. However, social or expressive motives, such as stated altruism, environmental concerns, and paternalism, are decisive for a significant minority. Our results rule out purely expressive voting and imply that a substantial share of the electorate perceived their impact on the outcome to be non-negligible.

Lon Fuller’s “Case of the Speluncean Explorers,” a hypothetical murder case involving a group of cannibalistic cave explorers, is one of the most well-known thought experiments in the field of law. Legal scholars and law students continue to use Fuller’s famous case to explore a wide variety of theoretical and practical questions in law. To our knowledge, however, no one has used Fuller’s imaginary case to address questions of judicial voting or human vs. machine judges. In this paper, we imagine an alternative system of appellate voting, a cardinal voting system in which judges assign a score to their preferred judicial outcome. Appellate courts, including the make-believe court in Fuller’s hypothetical, generally use an ordinal system of voting (i.e. one judge, one vote) to decide cases. By contrast, we propose a simple cardinal voting system for deciding appellate cases, using Fuller’s famous hypothetical to illustrate how our simple system of cardinal voting would work in practice.

We study the effect of public information on collective decision-making in committees, where members can have both common and conflicting interests. In the presence of public information, the simple and efficient vote-your-signal strategy profile no longer constitutes an equilibrium under the commonly-used simultaneous voting rules, while the intuitive but inefficient follow-the-expert strategy profile almost always does. Although more information may be aggregated if agents are able to coordinate on more sophisticated equilibria, inefficiency can persist even in large elections if the provision of public information introduces general correlation between the signals observed by the agents. We propose simple voting procedures that can indirectly implement the outcomes of optimal anonymous and ex post incentive compatible mechanisms with public information. The proposed voting procedures also have additional advantages when there is a concern for strategic disclosure of public information. This version: June 2017

Free and fair elections are cornerstones of democracy. In India, electronic voting machines (EVMs) were introduced with the objective of reducing electoral fraud. We exploit the phased roll-out of the EVMs in state assembly elections to study its impact on electoral fraud, democracy, and development. Our main findings are: (i) Introductions of EVMs led to a significant decline in electoral frauds, particularly in politically sensitive states which were subjected to frequent re-polls due to electoral rigging. (ii) It strengthened the weaker and the vulnerable sections of the society (women and the scheduled castes and tribe) who were now more likely to cast their vote. (iii) It made the electoral process more competitive whereby the winning margin and the vote share of the winning party declined. (iv) Using the luminosity data, we find that EVMs led to an increase in the provision of electricity. (v) Lastly, we find evidence that EVMs resulted in significant decline in crimes, such as murder and rape (violence against women).

More voters than ever get political news from their friends on social media platforms. Is this bad for democracy? Using context-neutral laboratory experiments, we find that biased (mis)information shared on social networks affects the quality of collective decisions relatively more than does segregation by political preferences on social media. Two features of subject behavior underlie this finding: 1) they share news signals selectively, revealing signals favorable to their candidates more often than unfavorable signals; 2) they naively take signals at face value and account for neither the selection in the shared signals nor the differential informativeness of news signals across different sources.

The recent literature provides different ways to model voting behavior with variation in decision weights. In this chapter, I will follow up on that and ask how we could detect systematic variation in decision weights and explicitly integrate it into a spatial model. Following the modeling tradition of Lin and Schofield, I formulate a baseline model that combines valence with spatial distance in a multidimensional policy space. Individual voting behavior is described by a utility function, which should allow for different levels of issue salience. The assumptions and implications of the vote model will be described in detail. Following to that, the vote function will be used as the baseline for a model of party competition. Since the goal is to identify equilibrium configurations within the policy space, but the model is analytically hard to track, I will describe an optimization algorithm for analyzing optimal party strategies. Eventually, this chapter will illustrate consequences of variation in issue weights on parties’ ideal positions in equilibrium based on stylized examples, that should help to create an intuition about expectations in empirical cases.

The conventional wisdom is that class divisions once prevailed but in recent decades have gradually declined. Indeed, many now suggest that the working class has been voting Republican since the 1980s. The historical evidence on voting in presidential elections does not indicate that there was a decline since the 1950s. If anything, the well-off and more educated have moved somewhat more Democratic, lessening class divisions. There has, however, been a change since the 2008 election, with the working class – whether only whites or all – moving away from the Democrats. This may not mean a decline of the working class voting their interests. It may be that the economic recovery of recent years has done little to help the working class and they have taken a gamble that a businessman will help their job prospects more.

Macro-level research on dynamic policy representation has been involved with political parties’ move assuming some kind of issue voting, which in turn has been tested using real micro-level datasets. If we are to theorize parties’ move, naturally we should make an assumption about how change in proximity causes change in voting behavior. However, most empirical tests at the micro-level have been made by inter-personal comparisons using cross-sectional datasets. In the present study, instead of examining inter-personal difference in voting, we are to examine change in voting behavior, so that dynamic policy representation theories have micro-foundations for predicting parties’ move over time. Our hypothesis is as follows: When a voter’s policy preference (the position in a policy space) is changed, then distance between the voter and each party is changed, and because of it the voter tends to change the party for which they vote. To test the hypothesis, we conduct statistical analyses, utilizing a Japanese micro-level panel dataset which includes annual responses from 2011 to 2014, taking voting intention as a proxy of voting choice. The results support the hypothesis for some issues but do not for the others. We find that decrease in distance between a voter and a party causes increase in the voter’s tendency to vote for the party, for the issues which are relatively concrete and related to well-defined measures. We can interpret that our micro-level findings reveal part of micro-mechanisms of macro-level electoral dynamics.

Since the chance of swaying the outcome of an election by voting is usually very small, it cannot be that voters vote solely for that purpose. So why do we vote? One explanation is that smarter or more educated voters have access to better information about the candidates, and are concerned with appearing to have better information about the candidates through their choice of whether to vote or not. If voting behavior is publicly observed then more educated voters may vote to signal their education, even if the election itself is inconsequential and the cost of voting is the same across voters. I explore this explanation with a model of voting where players are unsure about the importance of swaying the election and high type players receive more precise signals. I introduce a new information ordering, a weakening of Blackwell’s order, to formalize the notion of information precision. Once voting has occurred, players visit a labor market and are paid the expected value of their type, conditioning only on their voting behavior. I find that in very large games, voter turnout and the signaling return to voting remains high even though the chance of swaying the election disappears and the cost of voting is the same for all types. I explore generalizations of this model, and close by comparing the stylized features of voter turnout to the features of the model.

In general, most elections follow the principle of equality, or as it came to be known, the principle of “one man – one vote”. However, this principle might pose difficulties for voters, who are not well informed regarding the particular matter that is voted on. In order to address this issue, a new form of voting has been proposed, namely proxy voting. In proxy voting, each voter has the possibility to delegate her voting right to another voter, so called proxy, that she considers a trusted expert on the matter. In this paper we propose an end-to-end verifiable Internet voting scheme, which to the best of our knowledge is the first scheme to address voter coercion in the proxy voting setting.

We empirically evaluate creditors’ voting conditions and the bankruptcy voting rules of 90 countries. The severity of a voting rule is determined by the threshold values of the majority-voting rules by which creditors impose their interests. The higher the threshold values, the higher is the severity degree of the rule. We find that the bankruptcy laws of countries with German and French legal origin tend to have the least severe voting rules. The Nordic countries have moderate rules. The laws of the common law countries have the most severe rules. These results hold for secured and unsecured claimants. The court’s legal right of overcoming the voting result is granted more often by bankruptcy laws of French and German legal origin. The severity of the voting rules can influence the recovery of creditors’ debt. We show that a coalition of creditors that has a common interest can use the severity of the voting rule to influence the approval of a reorganization plan that provides a higher recovery rate of the creditors’ debt.

In advanced democracies, the expansion of internet voting in national elections appears to have stalled. New announcements by governments of online voting initiatives seem to be matched by announcements elsewhere that trials will not proceed, or that completed trials will not result in wider deployment. Debates between proponents and opponents of internet voting in advanced democracies now run along well-worn lines. The same examples are endlessly recycled. This apparent inertia at the national level masks the gradual increase in examples of deployment at the sub-national level. These sub-national cases provide a growing stock of evidence about more and less successful ways of managing transitions to voting by internet. This article draws upon advocacy coalition theory to analyse some of these sub-national developments, focusing on remote online voting in Australia and Canada.

Much of the theoretical literature on voting with private information finds that voters do not vote sincerely at the equilibrium. Yet there is little empirical support for this result. This paper shows that when the electorate is sufficiently divided, sincere voting is an equilibrium strategy for an arbitrarily large proportion of voters. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Support from Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (Spain) grant MDM 2014-0431, and Comunidad de Madrid grant MadEco-CM S2015/HUM-3444 is gratefully acknowledged.

An overview of the importance of the work of both Condorcet and Borda is presented from a historical perspective. Their work is discussed with an emphasis on the possible voting paradoxes that evolved directly from their work: Condorcet’s Paradox, Borda’s Paradox and Condorcet’s Other Paradox. Many other strange outcomes that could happen in elections are shown with examples of other voting paradoxes from later researchers, including: No Show Paradox, Ostrogorski’s Paradox, Majority Paradox and Referendum Paradox. The importance is established for evaluating these paradoxes on the basis of the probability that they might ever actually be observed in practice, to determine if they really pose a significant threat to the stability of elections or if they just reflect some interesting theoretical possibilities with a small number of candidates.