Testing the improved third vote during the 2018 election of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology student parliament

Abstract

Under the 'Third Vote' method, the voters cast no votes but are asked about their preferences on policy issues as declared in the party manifestos (like in voting advice applications, e.g. German Wahl-O-Mat). Then the policy profile of the electorate with the balance of public opinion on every issue is determined. The degree to which the parties match with it is expressed by the parties' representativeness indices of popularity (the average percentage of electors represented on all the issues) and universality (the percentage of cases when a majority is represented), and the parliament seats are distributed among the parties in proportion to their indices. The voters are no longer swayed by politicians' charisma and communication skills but are directed to subject matters behind personal images and ideological symbols. The focus on choice properties (e.g., political and economic implications of Brexit) is supposed to make vote more rational and responsible, and representative democracy 'more representative' and 'more democratic'. This method has been approbated during the 2016 and 2017 elections of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) Student Parliament (StuPa). The 2016 experiment showed that the method increased the parliament's representativeness but also revealed that the critical point was the selection of questions by the election committee. Indeed, they can be favorable for one party and unfavorable for another, or they can poorly discriminate between the parties, finally causing an equalization of sizes of the party factions in the parliament (regarded by some as the method's malfunction). These problems were tackled in the 2017 experiment. The eligible parties were asked to formulate questions themselves and to answer all of them, including the questions by other parties. The collected 94 questions were reduced to 25 using a model aimed at contrasting as much as possible between the parties by maximizing the total distance between the vectors which characterized their policy profiles. Thereby, ...