This book presents a collection of papers illustrating the variety of "experimental" methodologies used to study voting. Experimental methods include laboratory experiments in the tradition of political psychology, laboratory experiments with monetary incentives, in the economic tradition, survey experiments (varying survey, question wording, framing or content), as well as various kinds of field experimentation. Topics include the behavior of voters (in particular turnout, vote choice, and strategic voting), the behavior of parties and candidates, and the comparison of electoral rules.
The first edition of Get Out the Vote! broke ground by introducing a new scientific approach to the challenge of voter mobilization and profoundly influenced how campaigns operate. In this expanded and updated edition, the authors incorporate data from more than one hundred new studies, which shed new light on the cost-effectiveness and efficiency of various campaign tactics, including door-to-door canvassing, e-mail, direct mail, and telephone calls. Two new chapters focus on the effectiveness of mass media campaigns and events such as candidate forums and Election Day festivals. Available in time for the core of the 2008 presidential campaign, this practical guide on voter mobilization is sure to be an important resource for consultants, candidates, and grassroots organizations. Praise for the first edition: "Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber have studied turnout for years. Their findings, based on dozens of controlled experiments done as part of actual campaigns, are summarized in a slim and readable new book called Get Out the Vote!, which is bound to become a bible for politicians and activists of all stripes." —Alan B. Kreuger, in the New York Times "Get Out the Vote! shatters conventional wisdom about GOTV." —Hal Malchow in Campaigns & Elections "Green and Gerber's recent book represents important innovations in the study of turnout."—Political Science Review "Green and Gerber have provided a valuable resource for grassroots campaigns across the spectrum."—National Journal
Storable votes allow the minority to win occasionally while treating every voter equally and increasing the efficiency of decision-making, without the need for external knowledge of voters' preferences. This book complements the theoretical discussion with several experiments, showing that the promise of the idea is borne out by the data: the outcomes of the experiments and the payoffs realized match very closely the predictions of the theory.
Voters do not always choose their preferred candidate on election day. Often they cast their ballots to prevent a particular outcome, as when their own preferred candidate has no hope of winning and they want to prevent another, undesirable candidate’s victory; or, they vote to promote a single-party majority in parliamentary systems, when their own candidate is from a party that has no hope of winning. In their thought-provoking book The Many Faces of Strategic Voting, Laura B. Stephenson, John H. Aldrich, and André Blais first provide a conceptual framework for understanding why people vote strategically, and what the differences are between sincere and strategic voting behaviors. Expert contributors then explore the many facets of strategic voting through case studies in Great Britain, Spain, Canada, Japan, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and the European Union.
Voting is an examination of the factors that make people vote the way they do. Based on the famous Elmira Study, carried out by a team of skilled social scientists during the 1948 presidential campaign, it shows how voting is affected by social class, religious background, family loyalties, on-the-job relationships, local pressure groups, mass communication media, and other factors. Still highly relevant, Voting is one of the most frequently cited books in the field of voting behavior.
This thesis is concerned with investigating elements of computational social choice in the light of real-world applications. We contribute to a better understanding of the areas of fair allocation and multiwinner voting. For both areas, inspired by real-world scenarios, we propose several new notions and extensions of existing models. Then, we analyze the complexity of answering the computational questions raised by the introduced concepts. To this end, we look through the lens of parameterized complexity. We identify different parameters which describe natural features specific to the computational problems we investigate. Exploiting the parameters, we successfully develop efficient algorithms for spe- cific cases of the studied problems. We complement our analysis by showing which parameters presumably cannot be utilized for seeking efficient algorithms. Thereby, we provide comprehensive pictures of the computational complexity of the studied problems. Specifically, we concentrate on four topics that we present below, grouped by our two areas of interest. For all but one topic, we present experimental studies based on implementations of newly developed algorithms. We first focus on fair allocation of indivisible resources. In this setting, we consider a collection of indivisible resources and a group of agents. Each agent reports its utility evaluation of every resource and the task is to “fairly” allocate the resources such that each resource is allocated to at most one agent. We concentrate on the two following issues regarding this scenario. The social context in fair allocation of indivisible resources. In many fair allocation settings, it is unlikely that every agent knows all other agents. For example, consider a scenario where the agents represent employees of a large corporation. It is highly unlikely that every employee knows every other employee. Motivated by such settings, we come up with a new model of graph envy-freeness by adapting the classical envy-freeness notion to account for social relations of agents modeled as social networks. We show that if the given social network of agents is simple (for example, if it is a directed acyclic graph), then indeed we can sometimes find fair allocations efficiently. However, we contrast tractability results with showing NP-hardness for several cases, including those in which the given social network has a constant degree. Fair allocations among few agents with bounded rationality. Bounded rationality is the idea that humans, due to cognitive limitations, tend to simplify problems that they face. One of its emanations is that human agents usually tend to report simple utilities over the resources that they want to allocate; for example, agents may categorize the available resources only into two groups of desirable and undesirable ones. Applying techniques for solving integer linear programs, we show that exploiting bounded rationality leads to efficient algorithms for finding envy-free and Pareto-efficient allocations, assuming a small number of agents. Further, we demonstrate that our result actually forms a framework that can be applied to a number of different fairness concepts like envy-freeness up to one good or envy-freeness up to any good. This way, we obtain efficient algorithms for a number of fair allocation problems (assuming few agents with bounded rationality). We also empirically show that our technique is applicable in practice. Further, we study multiwinner voting, where we are given a collection of voters and their preferences over a set of candidates. The outcome of a multiwinner voting rule is a group (or a set of groups in case of ties) of candidates that reflect the voters’ preferences best according to some objective. In this context, we investigate the following themes. The robustness of election outcomes. We study how robust outcomes of multiwinner elections are against possible mistakes made by voters. Assuming that each voter casts a ballot in a form of a ranking of candidates, we represent a mistake by a swap of adjacent candidates in a ballot. We find that for rules such as SNTV, k-Approval, and k-Borda, it is computationally easy to find the minimum number of swaps resulting in a change of an outcome. This task is, however, NP-hard for STV and the Chamberlin-Courant rule. We conclude our study of robustness with experimentally studying the average number of random swaps leading to a change of an outcome for several rules. Strategic voting in multiwinner elections. We ask whether a given group of cooperating voters can manipulate an election outcome in a favorable way. We focus on the k-Approval voting rule and we show that the computational complexity of answering the posed question has a rich structure. We spot several cases for which our problem is polynomial-time solvable. However, we also identify NP-hard cases. For several of them, we show how to circumvent the hardness by fixed-parameter tractability. We also present experimental studies indicating that our algorithms are applicable in practice. Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit der Untersuchung von Themen des Forschungsgebiets Computational Social Choice im Lichte realer Anwendungen. Dabei trägt sie zu einem besseren Verständnis der Bereiche der fairen Zuordnung und der Mehrgewinnerwahlen bei. Für beide Konzepte schlagen wir – inspiriert von realen Anwendungen – verschiedene neue Begriffe und Erweiterungen bestehender Modelle vor. Anschließend analysieren wir die Komplexität der Beantwortung von Berechnungsfragen, die durch die eingeführten Konzepte aufgeworfen werden. Dabei fokussieren wir uns auf die parametrisierte Komplexität. Hierzu identifizieren wir verschiedene Parameter, welche natürliche Merkmale der von uns untersuchten Berechnungsprobleme beschreiben. Durch die Nutzung dieser Parameter entwickeln wir erfolgreich effiziente Algorithmen für Spezialfälle der untersuchten Probleme. Wir ergänzen unsere Analyse indem wir zeigen, welche Parameter vermutlich nicht verwendet werden können um effiziente Algorithmen zu finden. Dabei zeichnen wir ein umfassendes Bild der Berechnungskomplexität der untersuchten Probleme. Insbesondere konzentrieren wir uns auf vier Themen, die wir, gruppiert nach unseren beiden Schwerpunkten, unten vorstellen. Für alle Themen bis auf eines präsentieren wir Experimente, die auf Implementierungen der von uns neu entwickelten Algorithmen basieren. Wir konzentrieren uns zunächst auf die faire Zuordnung unteilbarer Ressourcen. Hier betrachten wir eine Menge unteilbarer Ressourcen und eine Gruppe von Agenten. Jeder Agent gibt eine Bewertung des Nutzens jeder Ressource ab und die Aufgabe besteht darin, eine "faire" Zuordnung der Ressourcen zu finden, wobei jede Ressource höchstens einem Agenten zugeordnet werden kann. Innerhalb dieses Bereiches konzentrieren wir uns auf die beiden folgenden Problemstellungen. Der soziale Kontext bei der fairen Zuordnung unteilbarer Ressourcen. In vielen Szenarien, in denen Ressourcen zugeordnet werden sollen, ist es unwahrscheinlich, dass jeder Agent alle anderen kennt. Vorstellbar ist beispielsweise ein Szenario, in dem die Agenten Mitarbeiter eines großen Unternehmens repräsentieren. Es ist höchst unwahrscheinlich, dass jeder Mitarbeiter jeden anderen Mitarbeiter kennt. Motiviert durch solche Szenarien entwickeln wir ein neues Modell der graph-basierten Neidfreiheit. Wir erweitern den klassischen Neidfreiheitsbegriff um die sozialen Beziehungen von Agenten, die durch soziale Netzwerke modelliert werden. Einerseits zeigen wir, dass wenn das soziale Netzwerk der Agenten einfach ist (zum Beispiel, wenn es sich um einen gerichteten azyklischen Graph handelt), in manchen Fällen faire Zuordnungen effizient gefunden werden können. Andererseits stellen wir diesen algorithmisch positiven Ergebnissen mehrere NP-schweren Fällen entgegen. Ein Beispiel für einen solchen Fall sind soziale Netzwerke mit einem konstanten Knotengrad. Faire Zuteilung an wenige Agenten mit begrenzter Rationalität. Begrenzte Rationalität beschreibt die Idee, dass Menschen aufgrund kognitiver Grenzen dazu neigen, Probleme, mit denen sie konfrontiert werden, zu vereinfachen. Eine mögliche Folge dieser Grenzen ist, dass menschliche Agenten in der Regel einfache Bewertungen der gewünschten Ressourcen abgeben; beispielsweise könnten Agenten die verfügbaren Ressourcen nur in zwei Gruppen, erwünschte und unerwünschte Ressourcen, kategorisieren. Durch Anwendung von Techniken zum Lösen von Ganzzahligen Linearen Programmen zeigen wir, dass unter der Annahme einer kleinen Anzahl von Agenten die Ausnutzung begrenzter Rationalität dabei hilft, effiziente Algorithmen zum Finden neidfreier und Pareto-effizienter Zuweisungen zu entwickeln. Weiterhin zeigen wir, dass unser Ergebnis ein allgemeines Verfahren liefert, welches auf eine Reihe verschiedener Fairnesskonzepte angewendet werden kann, wie zum Beispiel Neidfreiheit bis auf ein Gut oder Neidfreiheit bis auf irgendein Gut. Auf diese Weise gewinnen wir effiziente Algorithmen für eine Reihe fairer Zuordnungsprobleme (wenige Agenten mit begrenzter Rationalität vorausgesetzt). Darüber hinaus zeigen wir empirisch, dass unsere Technik in der Praxis anwendbar ist. Weiterhin untersuchen wir Mehrgewinnerwahlen, bei denen uns eine Menge von Wählern sowie ihre Präferenzen über eine Reihe von Kandidaten gegeben sind. Das Ergebnis eines Mehrgewinnerwahlverfahrens ist eine Gruppe (oder eine Menge von Gruppen im Falle eines Unentschiedens) von Kandidaten, welche die Präferenzen der Wähler am besten einem bestimmten Ziel folgend widerspiegeln. In diesem Kontext untersuchen wir die folgenden Themen. Die Robustheit von Wahlergebnissen. Wir untersuchen, wie robust die Ergebnisse von Mehrgewinnerwahlen gegenüber möglicher Fehler der Wähler sind. Unter der Annahme, dass jeder Wähler eine Stimme in Form einer Rangliste von Kandidaten abgibt, modellieren wir einen Fehler als einen Tausch benachbarter Kandidaten in der Rangliste. Wir zeigen, dass für Wahlregeln wie SNTV, k-Approval und k-Borda die minimale Anzahl an Vertauschungen, welche zu einer Ergebnisänderung führt, einfach zu berechnen ist. Für STV und die Chamberlin-Courant-Regel ist diese Aufgabe allerdings NP-schwer. Wir schließen unsere Untersuchung der Robustheit unterschiedlicher Wahlregeln ab mit einer experimentellen Evaluierung der durchschnittlichen Anzahl zufälliger Vertauschungen, die zu einer Änderung des Ergebnisses führen. Strategische Abstimmung bei Wahlen mit mehreren Gewinnern. Wir fragen, ob eine bestimmte Gruppe von kooperierenden Wählern ein Wahlergebnis zu ihren Gunsten manipulieren kann. Dabei konzentrieren wir uns auf die k-Approval-Wahlregel. Wir zeigen, dass die Berechnungskomplexität der besagten Manipulation eine reiche Struktur besitzt. Auf der einen Seite identifizieren wir mehrere Fälle in denen das Problem in Polynomzeit lösbar ist. Auf der anderen Seite identifizieren wir jedoch auch NP-schwere Fälle. Für einige von ihnen zeigen wir, wie die Berechnungsschwere durch parametrisierte Algorithmen umgangen werden kann. Wir präsentieren zudem experimentelle Untersuchungen, welche darauf hindeuten, dass unsere Algorithmen in der Praxis anwendbar sind.
Political behavior is the result of innumerable unnoticed forces and conscious deliberation is often a rationalization of automatically triggered feelings and thoughts. Citizens are very sensitive to environmental contextual factors such as the title 'President' preceding 'Obama' in a newspaper headline, upbeat music or patriotic symbols accompanying a campaign ad, or question wording and order in a survey, all of which have their greatest influence when citizens are unaware. This book develops and tests a dual-process theory of political beliefs, attitudes and behavior, claiming that all thinking, feeling, reasoning and doing have an automatic component as well as a conscious deliberative component. The authors are especially interested in the impact of automatic feelings on political judgments and evaluations. This research is based on laboratory experiments, which allow the testing of five basic hypotheses: hot cognition, automaticity, affect transfer, affect contagion and motivated reasoning.
No subject is more central to the study of politics than elections. All across the globe, elections are a focal point for citizens, the media, and politicians long before--and sometimes long after--they occur. Electoral systems, the rules about how voters' preferences are translated into election results, profoundly shape the results not only of individual elections but also of many other important political outcomes, including party systems, candidate selection, and policy choices. Electoral systems have been a hot topic in established democracies from the UK and Italy to New Zealand and Japan. Even in the United States, events like the 2016 presidential election and court decisions such as Citizens United have sparked advocates to promote change in the Electoral College, redistricting, and campaign-finance rules. Elections and electoral systems have also intensified as a field of academic study, with groundbreaking work over the past decade sharpening our understanding of how electoral systems fundamentally shape the connections among citizens, government, and policy. This volume provides an in-depth exploration of the origins and effects of electoral systems.
This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed conference proceedings of the First International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting, E-Vote-ID 2016, held in Bregenz, Austria, in October 2016. The 14 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 57 submissions. They represent a wide range of technological proposals for different voting settings (be it in polling stations, remote voting or even mobile voting) and case studies from different countries already using electronic voting or having conducted first trial elections.
Citizens living in presidential or parliamentary systems face different political choices as do voters casting votes in elections governed by rules of proportional representation or plurality. Political commentators seem to know how such rules influence political behaviour. They firmly believe, for example, that candidates running in plurality systems are better known and held more accountable to their constituencies than candidates competing in elections governed by proportional representation. However, such assertions rest on shaky ground simply because solid empirical knowledge to evaluate the impact of political institutions on individual political behaviour is still lacking. The Comparative Study of Electoral Systems has collected data on political institutions and on individual political behaviour and scrutinized it carefully. In line with common wisdom results of most analyses presented in this volume confirm that political institutions matter for individual political behaviour but, contrary to what is widely believed, they do not matter much.
