Examines social and demographic characteristics of early voters, candidate traits and issues that matter most to them, and determinants of vote choice, comparing their voting to that of election-day voters; based on exit polls, Nov. 1994; Texas.
Discussion of shareholder voting frequently begins against a background of the democratic expectations and justifications present in decision-making in the public sphere. Directors are assumed to be agents of the shareholders in much the same way that public officers are representatives of citizens. Recent debates about majority voting and shareholder nomination of directors illustrate this pattern. Yet the corporate process differs in significant ways, partly because the market for shares permits a form of intensity voting and lets markets mediate the outcome in a way that would be foreign to the public setting and partly because the shareholders' role is more limited than that of citizens in the political process. The most developed theory of corporate voting, Easterbrook & Fischel's economic based theory from the 1980s, describes shareholder voting as the best means to fill gaps in incomplete contracts; shareholders as the residual owners have the best economic incentives to exercise such discretion. Such a theory supports unfettered shareholder action substantially broader than what actually exists. In this article, we set out a new theory for shareholder voting based on information theory and more particularly voting as a method of error-correction. Like the prior theory, our approach explains why, among various corporate constituencies, only shareholders may vote. More importantly, our theory provides a more consistent theoretical foundation for explaining the few issues on which shareholders actually do vote. We use this approach to address the recent development of empty voting, a process where investors have used innovations in finance such as derivatives, equity swaps and share lending, to obtain voting rights in a corporation stripped of any financial interest in the company. The error-correction purpose of corporate voting requires that there be alignment between the voting right and the underlying financial interest of shares as has been illustrated in the traditional corporate law practices of ...
We introduce `Balanced Voting', a new voting scheme that is particularly suitable for making fundamental societal decisions. Such decisions typically involve subgroups that are strongly in favor of, or against, a new fundamental direction, and others that care much less. In a two-stage procedure, Balanced Voting works as follows: Citizens may abstain from voting on a fundamental direction in a first stage. In a second voting stage, this guarantees them a voting right on the variations of the fundamental direction chosen in the first. All 'losers' from the first stage also obtain voting rights in the second stage, while 'winners' do not. We develop a model with two fundamental directions for which stakes are high for some individuals and with private information about preferences among voters. We demonstrate that Balanced Voting is superior to simple majority voting, Storable Votes and Minority Voting with regard to utilitarian welfare if the voting body is sufficiently large. Moreover, the outcome under Balanced Voting is Pareto-dominant to the outcome under simple majority voting and Minority Voting. We discuss several aspects that need to be considered when Balanced Voting is applied in practice. We also suggest how Balanced Voting could be applied to elections.
Can we devise mechanisms that allow voters to express the intensity of their preferences when monetary transfers are forbidden? Can minorities be decisive over those issues they feel very strongly about? As opposed to the usual voting system (one person -- one decision -- one vote), we propose a voting system where each agent is endowed with a fixed number of votes that can be distributed freely among a set of issues that need to be approved or dismissed. Its novelty relies on allowing voters to express the intensity of their preferences in a simple manner. This voting system is optimal in a well-defined sense: in a strategic setting with two voters, two issues and preference intensities uniformly and independently distributed across possible values, Qualitative Voting Pareto dominates Majority Rule and, moreover, achieves the only exante optimal (incentive-compatible) allocation. The result also holds true with three voters, as long as the voters' preferences towards the issues differ sufficiently. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]
We introduce 'Balanced Voting', a new voting scheme that is particularly suitable for making fundamental societal decisions. Such decisions typically involve subgroups that are strongly in favor of, or against, a new fundamental direction, and others that care much less. In a two-stage procedure, Balanced Voting works as follows: Citizens may abstain from voting on a fundamental direction in a first stage. In a second voting stage, this guarantees them a voting right on the variations of the fundamental direction chosen in the first. All losers from the first stage also obtain voting rights in the second stage, while winners do not. We develop a model with two fundamental directions for which stakes are high for some individuals and with private information about preferences among voters. We demonstrate that Balanced Voting is superior to simple majority voting, Storable Votes and Minority Voting with regard to utilitarian welfare if the voting body is sufficiently large. Moreover,the outcome under Balanced Voting is Pareto-dominant to the outcome under simple majority voting and Minority Voting. We discuss several aspects that need to be considered when Balanced Voting is applied in practice. We also suggest how Balanced Voting could be applied to elections.
An examination of the effects of different definitions of the Wc on the measurement of class voting & left voting in Denmark, Norway, & Sweden. The operationalization of the Wc in the three countries is compared, & Swedish election survey data are recoded to conform more closely to the classification procedures used in Danish & Norwegian studies. The analysis shows that if a similar operationalization is used, the level of Left voting in both the Swedish Wcs & Mcs increases & the Alford index of class voting (see SA 14:5/66C1227) declines. Class voting & Left voting in the younger & older generations & among women & men are also discussed. It is concluded that dissimilar patterns of class voting & Left voting among women in the three countries are largely a product of different classification schemes. Problems in using the Alford index as a summary statistic in cross-national comparisons are identified. 7 Tables, 2 Figures, 32 References. Modified HA
What are we to make of shareholder voting? Delaware law presents voting as the ideological underpinning of a corporate governance system that gives directors wide control over other people's money. In the legal commentary, there are recurring descriptions of corporations as representative democracies in which New York Alumni Chancellor's Chair in Law & Professor of Management, Vanderbilt University. . Professor of Mathematics and Law, Vanderbilt University. We have benefited from the comments of Jeff Gordon, Sam Issacharoff, Curtis Milhaupt, Larry Ribstein, Lynn Stout, and participants at workshops at New York University, the University of Connecticut, and Emory University, colloquia at Columbia University, Fordham University, the University of Illinois, and the University of Iowa, and the Conference on Shareholder Roles, Shareholder Voting and Corporate Performance at the University of Cagliari. members act through their representatives, reinforcing a legitimacy role for corporate voting allied to political theory. Yet there is reason to wonder if corporate voting requires such a broad foundation. Voting plays a limited role in corporate decisionmaking, much more limited than in the public sphere. Shareholders have binding votes on only two things: the election of directors and ratifying fundamental corporate changes such as mergers. Even in those two areas, legislatures and courts have permitted substantial limits on the exercise of the shareholder franchise. Shareholders seldom seem to care much about the vote even when they have it, usually preferring the "Wall Street rule" (i.e., sell) when they disagree with a decision made by the corporation's managers.
This paper reconsiders the division of the literature on electoral competition into models with forwardlooking voters and those with backward-looking voters by combining ideas from both strands of the literature. As long as there is no uncertainty about voters' policy preferences and parties can commit in advance to a policy platform but not to a maximal level of rent extraction, voters can limit rents to the same extent as in a purely backward-looking model. At the same time, the policy preferred by the median voter is implemented as in a standard forward-looking model of political competition on an ideological policy dimension. Voters achieve this outcome by following a simple lexicographic voting strategy. They cast their vote in favor of their preferred policy position, but make their vote dependent on the incumbent parties' performance in office whenever they are indifferent. When uncertainty about the bliss point of the median voter is introduced into the model, voters have to accept higher rent payments, but they still retain some control over rent extraction.
Forms of convenience voting early in-person voting, voting by mail, absentee voting, electronic voting, and voting by fax have become the mode of choice for >30% of Americans in recent elections, Despite this, and although nearly every states in the United states has adopted at least one from of convenience voting, the academic research on these practices is unequally distributed across important questions, A great deal of literature on turnout is counterbalanced by a death of research on campaign effects, election cost, ballot quality, and the risk of fraud. This article introduces the theory of convenience voting, reviews the current literature, and suggests areas for future research. Adapted from the source document.