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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.--

A renewed, energetic interest in voting technologies erupted in political science following the 2000 presidential election. Spawned initially by the recount controversy in Florida, the literature has grown to consider the effects of voting technologies on the vote choice more generally. This literature has explained why localities have the voting technologies (lever machines, punch cards, etc.) they use. Although there are racial differences in the distribution of voting technologies used across localities, the strongest explanations for why local jurisdictions use particular technologies rest on legacies of past decisions. The bulk of the voting technology literature has focused on explaining how voting technologies influence residual votes, that is, blank, undervoted, and overvoted ballots. With the relative homogenization of voting technology since 2000, prospects for research that examines the effects of different machines on residual votes seem limited. However, opportunities exist to study the effect of voting machines historically, the effect of voting technologies on down-ballot rates, and the role of interest groups in affecting which voting technologies are made available to voters.

Preface -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1 Part I: Processing Information About Candidates/Voting Correctly -- 2 Part II: Processing Information About How Others Voters Vote: Impact on the Decision to Vote or to Abstain -- 3 Part III: Processing Information About How Others Voters Vote: The Impact of Polls on Candidate Choice -- 4 Part IV: Methodological Debate and Innovations -- 5 The Future of Voting Experiments -- References -- Part I: Processing Information About Candidates/Voting Correctly -- Deciding Correctly: Variance in the Effective Use of Party Cues -- 1 Theoretical Perspectives

Objectives. Economics, partisanship, and demographics have all been identified as linked to support for environmental protection. The principal objective of this study is to extend the extant literature by using a larger data set and a variety of methods.Methods. We use variety of statistical methods to test measures of party strength, demographics, and economics against county‐level data from 29 environmental initiative elections in 13 states.Results. Democratic partisanship is the most consistent predictor of aggregate support for environmental measures. This trend holds through pooled, individual‐level, and ecological inference analysis. Median family income and income squared are consistently significant, as is education.Conclusion. Based on these data, we reach three general conclusions. First, while several variables are consistently significant, party strength is the most consistent predictor of pro‐environmental voting across states and initiatives. Second, our analyses suggest that limiting analyses to data from a single state or region may have important implications for statistical inferences. Lastly, a preliminary analysis using methods of ecological inference suggests that the aggregate results are robust to ecological problems.

Democratic societies have been increasingly confronted with extreme, knife-edge election outcomes that affect everybody's lives and contribute to social instability. Even if political compromises based on social conventions as equity or economic arguments as efficiency are available, polarized societies might fail to select them. We demonstrate that part of the problem might be purely technical and, hence, potentially solvable. We study different voting methods in three experiments (total N = 5, 820), including small, medium-sized, and large electorates, and find that currently-used methods (Plurality Voting and Rank-Order systems) can lead voters to overwhelmingly support egoistic options. In contrast, alternative, more nuanced methods (Approval Voting and Borda Count) reduce the support for egoistic options and favor equity and efficiency, avoiding extreme outcomes. Those methods differ in whether they favor equity or efficiency when the latter benefits a majority. Our evidence suggests that targeted changes in the electoral system could favor socially-desirable compromises and increase social stability.