Suchergebnisse

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

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.--

This paper presents computer simulations of voting rules: Plurality rule, Approval voting and the Copeland and Borda rules, with voters voting sincerly or strategically. Different ways of generating random preference profiles are introduced: Rousseauist cultures are suitable for common interest project assessment; Impartial cultures are standard in Social Choice Theory; Distributive cultures and Spatial Euclidean ones are standard in Political Science.

This paper presents computer simulations of voting rules: Plurality rule, Approval voting and the Copeland and Borda rules, with voters voting sincerly or strategically. Different ways of generating random preference profiles are introduced: Rousseauist cultures are suitable for common interest project assessment; Impartial cultures are standard in Social Choice Theory; Distributive cultures and Spatial Euclidean ones are standard in Political Science.

Abstract
Survey experiments that investigate how voting procedures affect voting behavior and election outcomes use hypothetical questions and non-representative samples. We present here the results of a novel survey experiment that addresses both concerns. First, the winning party in our experiment receives a donation to its campaign funds inducing real consequences for voting. Second, we run an online experiment with a Dutch national representative sample (N = 1240). Our results validate previous findings using a representative sample, in particular that approval voting leads to a higher concentration in votes for smaller parties and strengthens centrist parties in comparison to plurality voting. Importantly, our results suggest that voting behavior is not affected by voting incentives and can be equally reliably elicited with hypothetical questions.

There are many situations in which different groups make collective decisions by committee voting, with each group represented by a single person. A natural question is what voting system such a committee should use. Concepts based on voting power provide guidelines for this choice. The two most prominent concepts require the Banzhaf power index to be proportional to the square root of group size or the Shapley-Shubik power index to be proportional to group size. Instead of studying the choice of voting systems based on such theoretical concepts, in this paper, I ask which systems individuals actually prefer. To answer this question, I design a laboratory experiment in which participants choose voting systems. I find that people behind the veil of ignorance prefer voting systems following the rule of proportional Shapley-Shubik power; in front of the veil subjects pr efer voting systems benefiting their own group. Participants' choices can only partially be explained by utility maximization or other outcome based concepts.

This paper tests the hypothesis that international migration experiences may promote better institutions at home by raising the demand for political accountability. In order to examine this question, we use a simple postcard voting experiment designed to capture the population's desire for better governance. Using data from a tailored household survey, we examine the determinants of voting behavior in our experiment, and isolate the positive effect of international emigration on the demand for political accountability. We find that this effect can be mainly attributed to the presence of return migrants, particularly to those who emigrated to countries with better governance.

This paper analyzes a recent ballot in which two virtually identical popular initiatives, both demanding a decrease in the legal age of retirement in Switzerland, led to differences in approval rates of nearly seven percentage points. Based on this unique natural experiment, the existence of emphasis framing effects is tested for and their determinants are identified outside of the controlled settings of laboratories. Nonetheless, the analyzed setting allows for considerably more control than usually available in the field: All party, government and interest group recommendations were symmetric for both initiatives, and the simultaneous vote rules out potential variation of individual preferences and compositional changes of the electorate over time. Using community and individual level data it is shown that the difference in approval rates is largely due to the different emphases in the initiatives' titles.