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The average voter falls far short of the prescriptions of classic democratic theory in terms of interest, knowledge, and participation in politics. We suggest a more realistic standard: Citizens fulfill their democratic duties if, most of the time, they vote "correctly." Relying on an operationalization of correct voting based on fully informed interests, we present experimental data showing that, most of the time, people do indeed manage to vote correctly. We also show that voters' determinations of their correct vote choices can be predicted reasonably well with widely available survey data. We illustrate how this measure can be used to determine the proportion of the electorate voting correctly, which we calculate at about 75% for the five American presidential elections between 1972 and 1988. With a standard for correct vote decisions, political science can turn to exploring the factors that make it more likely that people will vote correctly.

AbstractIt is time to correct the ongoing injustice of the under‐representation of women in governing institutions at all levels, perpetrated by the strenuous promotion of single‐member districts. Without an appropriate remedy, the full promise of the 14th and 19th Amendments will not be realized.

Roll-call votes of African American representatives are explored to discern more explicitly the ideological cohesiveness of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) and factors that affect vote choice. We use adjusted Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) scores. The adjustment corrects for changes in the ADA's scale from year to year. The analysis is carried out focusing on CBC coherence with respect to ideological voting and potential influences on Caucus unity We pool the CBC data from the period under investigation (1971-1996) to address the impact of variables identified as affecting roll call voting. The findings suggest that while there is considerably more diversity within the CBC than we some times imagine, African American representatives are more cohesive with the Black Caucus on roll call behavior than they are with either their regional or state party delegations. In addition, analyses suggest that seniority, correspondence between the president's party and the CBC, presidential policy preferences, percent black voters in the district, and electoral margin of victory in the district may help explain variation in Caucus unity Finally, we conclude high vote cohesion is meaningful for the CBC and the representation of black interests in Congress.

It is known that, in Condorcet's classical model of jury decisions, the proportion of jurors supporting a decision is not a significant indicator of that decision's reliability: the probability that a particular majority decision is correct given the size of the majority depends only on the absolute margin between the majority and the minority, and is invariant under changes of the proportion in the majority if the absolute margin is held fixed. Here I show that, if we relax the assumption that juror competence is independent of the jury's size, the proportion can be made significant: there are then conditions in which the probability that a given majority decision is correct depends only on the proportion of jurors supporting that decision, and is invariant under changes of the jury size. The proportion is significant in this way if and only if juror competence is a particular decreasing function of the jury size. However, the required condition on juror competence is not only highly special – thereby casting doubt on the significance of the proportion in realistic conditions – but it also has an adverse implication for the Condorcet jury theorem. If the proportion is significant, then the Condorcet jury theorem fails to hold; and if the Condorcet jury theorem holds, the proportion is not significant. I discuss the implications of these results for defining and justifying special majority voting from the perspective of an epistemic account of voting.

If we want to know what is happening to political parties today, the answer depends in part on how we define the term `party' and in part on the time frame used for analysis. In this paper we focus on parties as voting coalitions in the US House and the Senate over the last 40 years. To assess the ideological placement and cohesiveness of each party in the House and Senate, we use adjusted scores issued by the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA). Our adjustment corrects for changes in the ADA's scale from year to year. The analysis is carried out by focusing on each of the four main regional factions comprising the parties. The cross-chamber comparisons for the Republicans show a high degree of stability with respect to ideological placement and cohesiveness; eastern Republicans maintain a more liberal stance throughout the period of analysis. For Democrats in both chambers there has been a liberal shift in recent years and an increase in cohesiveness overall; the southern Democrats are distinctively more conservative than the rest of the party, although less so in recent years. Both of the `outlier' factions (eastern Republicans and southern Democrats) unexpectedly display less cohesiveness than do the mainline factions of their respective parties. The paper concludes with some discussion of why this may be the case, what the future holds for outlier cohesiveness, and implications for responsible parties in the United States.

There are two distinct views on how candidate (or party) issue strategies influence mass evaluations. One is the view underlying the classic spatial model that the proximity between the voter's own issue positions and the positions taken by the candidates drives the evaluation. The other view is directionally motivated. In the directional model voters are seen as having only diffuse preferences for one side or the other on an issue, with voter support and opposition stimulated by a candidate taking a strong stand in favor of a particular side. Researchers have long recognized that electorates are heterogeneous. We consider a model in which each of these two different views of issue-based voting is correct for a part of the electorate. We find that candidates trying to optimize support in this heterogeneous environment will generally adopt more extreme positions than those implied by proximity theory and more central positions than those implied by directional theory.

Originally published: A correct copy of the poll, for electing two representatives in Parliament, for the city and liberty of Westminster, taken Oct. 11, 1774. London : Cox and Bigg, 1774. ; "Reproduced from an original in the Library of the Institute of Historical Research, University of London"--T.p. verso. ; Mode of access: Internet.

In the literature on electoral politics full convergence of policy platforms is usually regarded as socially optimal. The reason is that risk-averse voters prefer a sure middle-of-the-road policy to a lottery of two extremes with the same expectation. In this paper we study the normative implications of convergence in a simple model of electoral competition, in which parties are uncertain about voters' preferences. We show that if political parties have incomplete information about voters' preferences, the voters may prefer some degree of policy divergence. The intuition is that policy divergence enables voters to correct policies that are based on a wrong perception of their desires.

Among the many lawsuits filed during the unprecedented California gubernatorial recall election, the one that garnered the most attention was the case challenging the use of punch card voting in six California counties. In that suit, plaintiffs argued that the election should be delayed because the allegedly higher error rates of punch card voting compared to other systems in California denied those voters in punch card counties their equal protection rights under the California constitution and also violated the Voting Rights Act. Professor Hasen argues that the original Ninth Circuit decision delaying the election until punch card voting could be eliminated was correct, and the later en banc decision allowing the election to go forward with the selective use of punch cards was unfortunate, though understandable given the closeness of the recall election. Hasen argues that under the Supreme Court's decision in Bush v. Gore, the selective use of punch card voting constitutes an equal protection violation. The en banc court did not reach the issue. Hasen concludes that the en banc decision does not preclude other plaintiffs from bringing similar challenges in the future, and that the window remains open for voting reform lawsuits until the Supreme Court interprets Bush v. Gore otherwise.

Under the assumptions of the standard Condorcet Jury Theorem, majority verdicts are virtually certain to be correct if the competence of voters is greater than one-half, and virtually certain to be incorrect if voter competence is less than one-half. But which is the case? Here we turn the Jury Theorem on its head, to provide one way of addressing that question. The same logic implies that, if the outcome saw 60 percent of voters supporting one proposition and 40 percent the other, then average voter competence must either be 0.60 or 0.40. We still have to decide which, but limiting the choice to those two values is a considerable aid in that.

This article builds a nonparametric method for inference from roll-call cohesion scores. Cohesion scores have been a staple of legislative studies since the publication of Rice's 1924 thesis. Unfortunately, little effort has been dedicated to understanding their statistical properties or relating them to existing models of legislative behavior. I show how a common use of cohesion scores, testing for distinct voting blocs, is severely biased toward Type I error, practically guaranteeing significant findings even when the null hypothesis is correct. I offer a nonparametric method—permutation analysis—that solves the bias problem and provides for simple and intuitive inference. I demonstrate with an examination of roll-call voting data from the Brazilian National Congress.

I develop a model of decision making in juries when there is uncertainty about jurors' preferences. I provide a characterization of the equilibrium strategy under any voting rule and show that nonunanimous rules are asymptotically efficient. Specifically, large juries make the correct decision with probability close to one. My analysis also demonstrates that under the unanimous rule, large juries almost never convict the defendant. The last result contrasts markedly with the literature and suggests that the unanimity rule can protect the innocent only at the price of acquitting the guilty.

Management buyouts have been seen by some commentators as restoring the owner-manager to the commercial and industrial scene. If correct this presents a novel twist to the long-running sociological debate on ownership and control which sees ownership as separated from control at the individual level. This paper reports results from a study of Scottish-based buyouts which occurred between 1982 and 1989. Only a small proportion of the total buyout finance is raised in the form of voting shares, which does indeed enable the buy-out team, albeit at the personal risk of considerable sums of money, to obtain majority control of the voting equity. However, in firms formerly in private hands, it is often the case that, while the management team retain formal control, they hold a smaller proportion of the voting shares than the previous owners. Crucially, however, the financial institutions, in exchange for providing equity and debt finance, enforce conditions which potentially constrain the owner-managers severely. In the last analysis the overall strategy of the company is too often in the hands of its financiers to allow the conclusion that the management buyout represents the reversal of the separation of ownership and control.