Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The legitimacy of democratic systems requires the protection of minority preferences while ideally treating every voter equally. During the 2006 student elections at Columbia University, we asked voters to rank the importance of different contests and to choose where to cast a single extra "bonus vote," had one been available — a simple version of Storable Votes. We then constructed distributions of intensities and electoral outcomes and estimated the probable impact of the bonus vote through bootstrapping techniques. The bonus vote performs well: when minority preferences are particularly intense, the minority wins at least one contest with 15-30 percent probability; when the minority wins, aggregate welfare increases with 85-95 percent probability. The paper makes two contributions: it tests the performance of storable votes in a setting where preferences were not controlled, and it suggests the use of bootstrapping techniques when appropriate replications of the data cannot be obtained.

We thank Dr. Arrington for his kind words about our article. In this letter we respond to
his two main criticisms: that our use of the term bias in describing the
situation facing the Democratic Party in 2006 is misleading and that using total vote to
assess the results of the election is preferable to using average district vote, as we did
in the article.

Democratic systems are built, with good reason, on majoritarian principles, but their legitimacy requires the protection of strongly held minority preferences. The challenge is to do so while treating every voter equally and preserving aggregate welfare. One possible solution is storable votes: granting each voter a budget of votes to cast as desired over multiple decisions. During the 2006 student elections at Columbia University, we tested a simple version of this idea: voters were asked to rank the importance of the different contests and to choose where to cast a single extra "bonus vote," had one been available. We used these responses to construct distributions of intensities and electoral outcomes, both without and with the bonus vote. Bootstrapping techniques provided estimates of the probable impact of the bonus vote. The bonus vote performs well: when minority preferences are particularly intense, the minority wins at least one of the contests with 15--30 percent probability; and, when the minority wins, aggregate welfare increases with 85--95 percent probability. When majority and minority preferences are equally intense, the effect of the bonus vote is smaller and more variable but on balance still positive.

The 2008 U.S. House elections mark the first time since 1994 that the Democrats will seek to retain a majority. With the political climate favoring Democrats this year, it seems almost certain that the party will retain control, and will likely increase its share of seats. In five national polls taken in June of this year, Democrats enjoyed on average a 13-point advantage in the generic congressional ballot; as Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezien (2007) point out, these early polls, suitably adjusted, are good predictors of the November vote. As of late July, bettors at intrade.com put the probability of the Democrats retaining a majority at about 95% (Intrade.com 2008). Elsewhere in this symposium, Klarner (2008) predicts an 11-seat gain for the Democrats, while Lockerbie (2008) forecasts a 25-seat pickup.

As the 2006 midterm elections approached, pollsters, scholars, and
journalists attempted to predict whether the Democrats would take
back the House, Senate, or both. Much media attention was paid to
President George W. Bush's declining popularity and the public's
dissatisfaction with the Republican-controlled Congress (see e.g.,
Cook 2006). With most attention paid to
the immediate political dynamics of the campaign, less noticed
(though not entirely neglected) was the fact that the Democrats
faced a significant structural disadvantage in their effort to
retake both houses of Congress. The Democrats faced an uphill battle
to control the Senate simply due to the small number of seats that
were seriously contested. Their hurdle to taking over the House was
subtler but perhaps just as high: as we show here, they needed to
win well over half the vote share in order to have an even chance of
winning 50% of the seats, thereby overcoming a structural advantage
enjoyed by Republicans leading up to Election Day. We thank Gary Jacobson and Walt Borges for
generously sharing their data, Robert Erikson, Eduardo Leoni,
Robert Shapiro, David Epstein, and two anonymous reviewers for
helpful comments, and the National Science Foundation for
financial support. Replication datasets and statistical code are
available at
www.columbia.edu/∼jpk2004/house2006.html.

Democratic systems are built, with good reason, on majoritarian principles, but their legitimacy requires the protection of strongly held minority preferences. The challenge is to do so while treating every voter equally and preserving aggregate welfare. One possible solution is storable votes: granting each voter a budget of votes to cast as desired over multiple decisions. During the 2006 student elections at Columbia University, we tested a simple version of this idea: voters were asked to rank the importance of the different contests and to choose where to cast a single extra "bonus vote," had one been available. We used these responses to construct distributions of intensities and electoral outcomes, both without and with the bonus vote. Bootstrapping techniques provided estimates of the probable impact of the bonus vote. The bonus vote performs well: when minority preferences are particularly intense, the minority wins at least one of the contests with 15--30 percent probability; and, when the minority wins, aggregate welfare increases with 85--95 percent probability. When majority and minority preferences are equally intense, the effect of the bonus vote is smaller and more variable but on balance still positive.

Democratic systems are built, with good reason, on majoritarian principles, but their legitimacy requires the protection of strongly held minority preferences. The challenge is to do so while treating every voter equally and preserving aggregate welfare. One possible solution is storable votes: granting each voter a budget of votes to cast as desired over multiple decisions. During the 2006 student elections at Columbia University, we tested a simple version of this idea: voters were asked to rank the importance of the different contests and to choose where to cast a single extra "bonus vote," had one been available. We used these responses to construct distributions of intensities and electoral outcomes, both without and with the bonus vote. Bootstrapping techniques provided estimates of the probable impact of the bonus vote. The bonus vote performs well: when minority preferences are particularly intense, the minority wins at least one of the contests with 15.30 percent probability; and, when the minority wins, aggregate welfare increases with 85.95 percent probability. When majority and minority preferences are equally intense, the effect of the bonus vote is smaller and more variable but on balance still positive.

For decades, the Democrats have been viewed as the party of the poor, with the Republicans representing the rich. Recent presidential elections, however, have shown a reverse pattern, with Democrats performing well in the richer blue states in the northeast and coasts, and Republicans dominating in the red states in the middle of the country and the south. Through multilevel modeling of individual level survey data and county- and state-level demographic and electoral data, we reconcile these patterns. Furthermore, we find that income matters more in red America than in blue America. In poor states, rich people are much more likely than poor people to vote for the Republican presidential candidate, but in rich states (such as Connecticut), income has a very low correlation with vote preference. Adapted from the source document.

The roof and spire of Notre‐Dame cathedral in Paris that caught fire and collapsed on 15 April 2019 were covered with 460 t of lead (Pb). Government reports documented Pb deposition immediately downwind of the cathedral and a twentyfold increase in airborne Pb concentrations at a distance of 50 km in the aftermath. For this study, we collected 100 samples of surface soil from tree pits, parks, and other sites in all directions within 1 km of the cathedral. Concentrations of Pb measured by X‐ray fluorescence range from 30 to 9,000 mg/kg across the area, with a higher proportion of elevated concentrations to the northwest of the cathedral, in the direction of the wind prevailing during the fire. By integrating these observations with a Gaussian process regression model, we estimate that the average concentration of Pb in surface soil downwind of the cathedral is 430 (95% interval, 300–590) mg/kg, nearly double the average Pb concentration in the other directions of 240 (95% interval, 170–320) mg/kg. The difference corresponds to an integrated excess Pb inventory within a 1 km radius of 1.0 (95% interval, 0.5–1.5) t, about 0.2% of all the Pb covering the roof and spire. This is over 6 times the estimated amount of Pb deposited downwind 1–50 km from the cathedral. To what extent the concentrated fallout within 1 km documented here temporarily exposed the downwind population to Pb is difficult to confirm independently because too few soil, dust, and blood samples were collected immediately after the fire.

The 2008 U.S. House elections mark the first time since 1994 that the Democrats will seek to retain a majority. With the political climate favoring Democrats this year, it seems almost certain that the party will retain control, and will likely increase its share of seats. In five national polls taken in June of this year, Democrats enjoyed on average a 13-point advantage in the generic congressional ballot; as Bafumi, Erikson, and Wlezien (2007) point out, these early polls, suitably adjusted, are good predictors of the November vote. As of late July, bettors at intrade.com put the probability of the Democrats retaining a majority at about 95% (Intrade.com 2008). Elsewhere in this symposium, Klarner (2008) predicts an 11-seat gain for the Democrats, while Lockerbie (2008) forecasts a 25-seat pickup. In this paper we document how the electoral playing field has shifted from a Republican advantage between 1996 and 2004 to a Democratic tilt today. In an earlier article (Kastellec, Gelman, and Chandler 2008), we predicted the seats-votes curve in the 2006 election, showing how the Democrats faced an uphill battle in their effort to take control of the House and, their victory notwithstanding, ended up winning a lower percentage of seats than their average district vote nationwide. We follow up on this analysis by using the same method to predict the seats-votes curve in 2008. Due to the shift in incumbency advantage from the Republicans to the Democrats, compounded by a greater number of retirements among Republican members, we show that the Democrats now enjoy a partisan bias, and can expect to win more seats than votes for the first time since 1992. While this bias is not as large as the advantage the Republicans held in 2006, it will likely help the Democrats increase their share of seats.