Studies on political knowledge routinely find that women have lower levels of political knowledge than men. This gender gap in political knowledge is usually interpreted as troublesome for democracy, because a lack of political knowledge could imply that women's participation in politics is less effective and that their interests will be represented less well than those of men. In this short article, we present a direct test of the assumption that women are less effective voters because of this lack of political knowledge. We make use of CSES data to study gender differences in proximity voting and correct voting. Our results do not suggest that women vote less correctly than men—a conclusion that prompts important questions about the role of different forms of political knowledge, and the seemingly gendered nature of the vote choice.
Ova doktorska disertacija bavi se glasovanjem, najočitijim oblikom političke participacije građana u modernom demokratskom poretku. Većina istraživanja biračkog ponašanja usmjerena je na proučavanje uzroka glasovanja te na procese oblikovanja stranačkih preferencija (Šiber, 1998b). Međutim, glasovanju možemo pristupiti kao političkoj odluci, a u tom slučaju se javlja pitanje kako tu odluku evaluirati. Potencijalni kriterij za evaluaciju možemo naći u konceptu točnog glasovanja (Lau i Redlawsk, 1997). Ukoliko građanin glasuje za onu stranku kojoj bi dao glas i kada bi bio suočen sa svim relevantnim političkim informacijama, možemo reći da je on točno glasovao. Koristeći kriterij točnog glasovanja možemo evaluirati građansko odlučivanje, ali i kvalitetu demokracije. Ovaj rad ima dva cilja. Kao prvo, zbog niza konceptualnih i operacionalnih nedostataka, on nudi rekonstrukciju koncepta točnog glasovanja. Kroz detaljno povezivanje spoznaja o biračkom ponašanju i pretpostavki modela predstavničke demokracije, uvodi se nova definicija točnog glasovanja, kao onog koji je dan stranci koja je u najvećoj mjeri bliska glasačevim preferencijama. Uz to, problematizira se korisnost ovog koncepta te njegov utjecaj na empirijska istraživanja građanskih kompetencija i na evaluaciju demokratskog poretka. Drugi cilj ovog rada je empirijski – provjeriti koje individualne i situacijske karakteristike doprinose točnom glasovanju. Očekivalo se kako će točnije glasovati sudionici s boljom političkom ekspertizom (visoka politička sofisticiranost i informiranost, visoka motivacija za politiku, više obrazovanje i niža dob), ali i oni koji donose odluke u jednostavnijem okruženju (niže kognitivno opterećenje i lakša politička pitanja). U tu svrhu provedeno je eksperimentalno istraživanje na 210 sudionika koji su sudjelovali u izmišljenoj političkoj kampanji. Tijekom kampanje su prikupljali podatke o strankama i na kraju su glasovali za jednu od njih. Rezultati su pokazali kako točnije glasuju sudionici s višom razinom političke informiranosti, zatim sudionici koji su koristili kompleksnije strategije odlučivanja i sudionici koji su suočeni s nižom razinom kognitivnog opterećenja. Neočekivano, dobiven je i efekt spola – žene točnije glasuju od muškaraca. U radu su ponuđena objašnjenja za nepotvrđene hipoteze i neočekivane rezultate, kao i potencijalna primjena dobivenih rezultata u javnom životu. ; Elections are the main characteristic of modern democracies; as of September 2016., 82 national elections took place this year and almost 650 million people voted. Adult citizens experience elections and participate in voting roughly once every four years. Ever since the empirical research in political science focused on voting behaviour the main focus of inquiry was the understanding of antecedents of vote choice as well as the long-term shaping of political preferences (Šiber, 1998). The vote itself can be conceptualized in many ways, such as a statement of group membership (e.g. Berelson, Lazarsfeld & McPhee, 1954), identification with the party (Campbell et al., 1964), as a choice between parties etc. If we approach the vote from a decision-making perspective, a question comes to mind – can we say what is the quality of that choice? In other words, can we evaluate the process and the outcome of the voting decision? This are rather hard questions which is not adequately addressed by researchers, both theoretically and empirically. In order to answer them, Lau and Redlawsk (1997) put forward the concept of correct voting – a vote that is the same as the one that would be given if a voter had all the relevant information. This doctoral thesis is concerned with that concept. It had two broad goals. First, a critique of the concept was put forward, as well as a conceptual reconstruction of correct voting. The new approach to the concept is more clear and better connected to both citizens' competences and democratic theory. The second goal was to study empirically the antecedents of correct voting. For this goal a laboratory experiment was conducted in which participants (N=210) participated in a mock electoral campaign at the end of which they had to vote. Participants differed in various socio-demographic and political characteristics and within the experiment cognitive load and type of political questions in the campaign were manipulated. Results showed that those participants that had better political knowledge, were exposed to lower cognitive load and used complex strategies of decision. Also, an unexpected result was found – women voted more correctly than men. In order to think about the criteria for evaluating the process of voting, one must first understand the relationship between voters and election within democracy. This requires that one chooses a model of democracy. There is an array of these models, and each one focuses on different aspects of the political regime. For the concept of correct voting the most adequate model is that of representative democracy. In this model, democracy is though about as a political system in which the citizens are sovereign, and a smaller group of representatives execute citizens' will. Representatives are chosen via regular competitive elections, and citizens should choose hose representatives that represent their interest in the best way. Other than choosing a model of democracy, we must choose a theoretical approach for political behaviour. We can identify five approaches (those based on personality, sociological model, socio-psychological model, economic-rational model and cognitive model), and within this research a cognitive approach is taken for studying political behaviour and decision-making. This model focuses on cognitive processes, such as evaluation of political candidates, mental strategies, biases, memory etc. The main idea of the cognitive approach is that all thinking is constrained by both biological aspects of the brain as well as the situational pressures (such as the amount of information). As a consequence, citizens will be prone to using mental shortcuts to simplify the political environment. Lau and Redlawsk's (1997) concept of correct voting could be used as a norm of political decision-making. It focuses on cognitive processes and offers an ideal outcome of political thinking which at the same time has implications for the functioning of representative democracy. If citizens choose their representatives correctly than democracy should function better than if that is not the case. However, there are several issues with this concept - there are two distinct conceptualizations and operationalisations of correct voting; authors focus more on the level of information than on the cognitive processes; their norm has within itself several descriptive aspects etc. This thesis puts forward a definition of correct voting – a correct vote is the one which is given to a representative whose political preferences are in the highest concordance with the voter's. Keeping the cognitive approach in mind, several individual and situational characteristics are identified as having a probable impact on the probability for voting correctly. It is expected that citizens who are more politically sophisticated, informed and motivated, as well as those who are better educated and younger should vote more correctly. Considering situational characteristics, higher cognitive load should lower the probability of voting correctly. Also the content, or type of political information, should have an impact on that probability. Political issues can be divided into easy/symbolic/moral and hard/instrumental/public policy. As the percentage of easy issues within a campaign increases so should the probability of casting a correct vote. In order to test these hypotheses an experiment was conducted in which participants participated in a mock election. They collected information about four parties and in the end voted for one of these. Last part of the thesis offers a discussion about the results, their political implications as well as guidelines for future research.
I argue that voters do quite well translating their preferences to votes in ballot proposition races vis-à-vis presidential elections. Overall voters get it right almost 80% of the time, and on some ballot measures more than 85% vote correctly. Though some initiatives are 'harder issues' (see Carmines and Stimson 1980) and voters are less successful at voting correctly on those issues, they still get it right upwards of 70% of the time. Confusion, while not a clear cause of a status quo bias in direct democracy, does impair the ability of voters to vote correctly. Conversely, voters who are aware of political cues or heuristics are better able to match their stated preferences with their votes or more simply, vote correctly. No matter your judgment about the levels of correct voting, the 80% that get it right is a good level or the 20% that get it wrong is mind blowingly unacceptable, it is a rare occurrence that election results would actually change if everyone voted correctly
Conventional democratic institutions aggregate preferences poorly. The norm of one-person-one-vote with majority rule treats people fairly by giving everyone an equal chance to influence outcomes but fails to give proportional weight to people whose interests in a social outcome are stronger than those of other people. This problem leads to the familiar phenomenon of tyranny of the majority. Various institutions that have been tried or proposed over the years to correct this problem-including supermajority rule, weighted voting, cumulative voting, "mixed constitutions," executive discretion, and judicially protected rights-all badly misfire in various ways, for example, by creating gridlock or corruption. This Article proposes a new form of political decisionmaking based on the theory of quadratic voting. It explains how quadratic voting solves the preference-aggregation problem by giving proper weight to preferences of varying intensity, how it can be incorporated into political institutions, and why it should improve equity.
The concept of correct voting, which refers to a vote that is the same one that would have been made under conditions of full information, has been used to evaluate citizens' voting decisions in various settings. Most studies either focus on determining individual and situational predictors of correct voting or determining the correctness of voting via heuristics. Since heuristics can lead to better decision outcomes than systematic processes, the goal of this study was to analyze how different modes of decision-making strategies, as well as individual and situational characteristics, contribute to correct voting. To answer this question, an experiment was conducted in Croatia, a previously unstudied context for correct voting, in which participants gathered information on four parties in a mock election campaign. Results showed that higher political motivation and usage of compensatory decision-making strategies had a positive impact on the probability of casting a correct vote. However, direct effect of cognitive load was found for participants with low levels of political motivation, for which an increase in cognitive load resulted in 25% less probability of voting correctly. ; Točno glasovanje definira se kao glasovanje koje je identično onome danom u uvjetima potpune informiranosti. Taj koncept je korišten za evaluaciju glasačkih odluka u nizu konteksta. Većina istraživanja usmjerava se na utvrđivanje individualnih i situacijskih prediktora točnog glasovanja ili na evaluaciju točnosti glasovanja putem mentalnih heuristika. S obzirom da heuristike mogu rezultirati kvalitetnijim odlukama od sustavnog procesa odlučivanja, cilj ovog istraživanja jest analizirati kako različiti procesi donošenja odluka, te različite individualne i situacijske karakteristike, doprinose točnom glasovanju. Kako bi se odgovorilo na taj cilj, proveden je eksperiment u hrvatskom kontekstu u kojem se do sada nije istraživalo točno glasovanje. Sudionici u eksperimentu prikupljali su informacije o četiri stranke tijekom lažne kampanje za ...
When people vote, does their preferred candidate represent the policies that are best for them? Not necessarily – a lack of information can often lead to people voting 'incorrectly' against their interests or beliefs. Using a new method of measuring this incorrect voting in presidential elections, Aaron Dusso finds that when choosing between candidates, strong partisans and those who believe that the economy is doing better for them, but who also have poor knowledge of candidates' policy positions, are much more likely to vote for the 'wrong' candidate.
VOTING THEORY FOR DEMOCRACY provides the concepts and tools for democratic decision making. Voting is used not only in politics and government, but also in business - and not only in the shareholders' meetings but also in teams. Voting however can suffer from paradoxes. In some systems, it is possible that candidate A wins from B, B from C, and C from A again. This book explains and solves those paradoxes, and thereby it gives a clarity that was lacking up to now. The author proposes the new scheme of 'Pareto Majority' which combines the good properties of the older schemes proposed by Pareto, Borda and Condorcet, while it adds the notion of a (Brouwer) 'fixed point'. Many people will likely prefer this new scheme over Plurality voting which is currently the common practice. The literature on voting theory has suffered from some serious miscommunications in the last 50 years. Nobel Prize winning economists Kenneth Arrow and Amartya Sen created correct mathematical theorems, but gave incorrect verbal explanations. The author emphasises that there is a distinction between 'voting' and deciding. A voting field only becomes a decision by explicitly dealing with the paradoxes. Arrow and Sen did not solve the paradoxes and used them instead to conclude that it was 'impossible' to find a 'good' system. This however is a wrong approach. Once we understand the paradoxes, we can find the system that we want to use. This book develops the theory of games (with Rasch - Elo rating) to show that decisions can change, even dramatically, when candidates or items are added to the list or deleted from it. The use of the fixed point criterion however limits the impact of such changes, and if these occur, they are quite reasonable. Groups are advised, therefor, to spend time on establishing what budget they will vote on. You can benefit from this book also when you do not have the software. However, with the software, you will have an interactive environment in which you and your group can use the various voting schemes, or test ...
The Brexit referendum and the last presidential election in the USA are just two examples of recent vote results that have been wrongly predicted. This research paper aims to identify the formation of voting behaviour to revaluate the necessary factors and variables in the correct and scientific prediction and analysis of voting behaviour. More specifically, this paper chose anti-European voting behaviour in Germany, which is also a current European-wide societal phenomenon, to analyse and explain the formation of general voting behaviour in detail. Many researchers, including Goodwin and Heath (2016), analysed the quality of existing polling methodology to explain the incorrect prediction of the Brexit result. This research forms a new approach towards the identification of voting behaviour by including more variables than usual. In collaboration with YouGov Deutschland GmbH, a strategic sample of the German population of 993 participants was formed. Participants were asked questions relating to individual differences, political ideology, attitudes towards daily political topics and socio-demographic factors. Voters who voted for the AfD, the main anti-European party in Germany, were more likely to be in some form of relationship, were more likely to be male, and over-represented the age group 40–49. Finally, voters voted for the AfD because the party engaged with political topics in a way that no other party did. This research is somewhat limited because the questionnaire focused on voters voting for the AfD. Furthermore, quantitative research can only identify and analyse individual human behaviour to a certain extent, whereas qualitative data, which this research lacks, can potentially help to identify voting behaviour. Relevant and important factors such as political ideology and individual differences, which are included here, but are usually not part of political research, must play a role in the future identification of voting behaviour.
Voting system using blockchain aims at providing the facility to cast vote from anywhere. It has the workability to allow casting of vote from any remote location. The election is held in full confidentiality that security is maintained in such a manner that voter can vote only if he logs into the system by entering the correct username and password. Voter will get the username and secret password to cast his vote. The voter will log into the system using his unique ID, they will then give his/her vote which will be stored into block-chain. Internet voting focuses on security, privacy, and secrecy issues, as well as challenges for stakeholder involvement and observation of the process. A new approach is proposed for voting system to prevent manipulation of the votes. Block chain overcomes the drawbacks of the previous voting system. It increases the security by not allowing the hacker to affect the rest of the nodes in the block chain. Voters can effectively submit their vote without revealing their identity or political preferences to the public. Counting votes becomes easy for the official since only one vote can be casted by each voter. no fake accounts can be created by anyone.
With the entrance and growing popularity of populist radical right parties (PRRs) in Western and Eastern European democracies in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, the scientific and public debate has recently focused on the 'threatening' and 'corrective' consequences of the PRR for contemporary democracies. Some have claimed that the PRR constitutes a serious threat to democracy because its leaders employ a radical notion of democracy that emphasizes a homogeneous voice —the 'voice of the people'— and excludes minorities. Others have noted that these PRRs actually correct democratic deficiencies by speaking to a large group of citizens disillusioned with mainstream politicians. Citizens believe that there is someone who 'listens to their grievances' and who has enabled them to become passionately involved in politics. This dissertation contributes to the ongoing public and scholarly debate about the consequences of PRR popularity on democracy, and more specifically its influence on the voting behavior of European citizens. The central aim of this study was to gain insight into the extent to which popular PRRs influence (1) the decision of non-voters to vote (again), and (2) the decision of cleavage voters, who are known for their voting stability, to reconsider their habitual votes. This dissertation shows that despite anecdotal evidence that certain PRR leaders seemed able to fuel popular engagement with politics, this is not a shared phenomenon typical of the European PRR family. Departing from the notion that popular PRRs bring more electoral competition and polarization by introducing a different political style and party program, this dissertation shows that in general, nonvoters and cleavage voters do not reconsider their party choice. Nonvoters generally remain nonvoters, religious people remain Christian-Democrat voters, and women remain non-PRR voters. These findings highlight the importance of providing empirical scrutiny to the often-repeated claims in the media that the PRR forms either a 'threat' or a ...
In certain judgmental situations where a correct decision is presumed to exist, optimal decision making requires evaluation of the decision-maker's capabilities and the selection of the appropriate aggregation rule. The major and so far unresolved difficulty is the former necessity. This paper presents the optimal aggregation rule that simultaneously satisfies these two interdependent necessary requirements. In our setting, some record of the voters' past decisions is available, but the correct decisions are not known. We observe that any arbitrary evaluation of the decision-maker's capabilities as probabilities yields some optimal aggregation rule that, in turn, yields a maximum-likelihood estimation of decisional skills. Thus, a skill-evaluation equilibrium can be defined as an evaluation of decisional skills that yields itself as a maximum-likelihood estimation of decisional skills. We show that such equilibrium exists and offer a procedure for finding one. The obtained equilibrium is locally optimal and is shown empirically to generally be globally optimal in terms of the correctness of the resulting collective decisions. Interestingly, under minimally competent (almost symmetric) skill distributions that allow unskilled decision makers, the optimal rule considerably outperforms the common simple majority rule (SMR). Furthermore, a sufficient record of past decisions ensures that the collective probability of making a correct decision converges to 1, as opposed to accuracy of about 0.7 under SMR. Our proposed optimal voting procedure relaxes the fundamental (and sometimes unrealistic) assumptions in Condorcet celebrated theorem and its extensions, such as sufficiently high decision-making quality, skill homogeneity or existence of a sufficiently large group of decision makers.
The expression "vote" intends to choose from a given rundown, or decide. The center motivation behind voting is to think of best pioneers of the general population's predominant. It is investigated from the writing that the conventional voting framework has various blemishes i.e. tedious, printed material, high cost and more extreme issue is ragging particularly in Asian Countries. To defeat distinguished issues in the constituent procedure, another technique was purposed by a few analysts; Electronic Voting. A few E-voting frameworks have been created and accessible in the market. Besides, it is additionally recognized that the current E- Voting System needs in giving the proper arrangement in term of the discretionary procedure. In this modification, the structure of the information gathering strategy, the present framework assessment and the structure of the framework of the framework of the framework has been shown. This particular technique has been used as part of the use, specific needs to meet project targets, specific requirements for honor of venture and a clear explanation that such strategy Why has been used to correct the proposed framework, in addition to the current management of voting. To accomplish these targets a philosophy is defined and isolated into five stages in like manner: Stage I: Examination of current v-system. Stage II: outlining new structure. Stage III: EV System planning based on web. Stage IV: EV System development based on web. Stage V: EV System testing based on web. This framework helps in overseeing/directing discretionary process advantageously and safely
The recent wave of populism sweeping Europe and the Americas generated considerable interest among political scientists, economists, sociologists and to some extent, geographers. The vast majority of these studies focuses on individual voter decisions or national comparisons over time but neglects the within-country spatial variation of the populist vote. This paper addresses this shortcoming and applies spatial econometric techniques to explore possible explanations for spatial variation in the increase of the populist right vote between the 2013 and 2017 national elections in Austria for 2118 municipalities. Spatial variation in voting shares can result from (1) compositional effects, regional differences in the composition of voters with different characteristics, (2) broad spatial, historically evolved institutional differences, such as membership to one of the nine states, (3) unequal integration of different types of regions into the global economy, such as peripheral regions, central urban regions, old industrial regions or tourist areas, (4) spatial vote spillovers due to localized social networks, and (5) unobserved spatial processes. We find that the populist right vote gains in Austrian municipalities are affected by all processes, but that the type of regions becomes insignificant once we correct for unobservable spatial structures in the regression framework. The increase in the share of foreigners, the share of foreigners, income and inequality levels, educational differences, selected state membership, as well as spatial spillovers of populist right voting are all important to explain spatial variation in the rise of the populist right vote.
An E-voting system is end-to-end verifiable if arbitrary external parties can check whether the result of the election is correct or not. It is tally-hiding if it does not disclose the full election result but rather only the relevant information, such as e.g. the winner of the election. In this thesis we pursue the goal of constructing an end-to-end verifiable tally-hiding E-voting system using fully homomorphic encryption. First we construct an alteration of the GSW levelled fully homomorphic encryption scheme based on the learning with errors over rings assumption. We utilize a key homomorphic property of this scheme in order to augment the scheme by a distributed key generation and distributed decryption. This leads to a passively secure 4-round multi-party computation protocol in the common random string model that can evaluate arithmetic circuits of arbitrary size. The complexity of this protocol is quasi-linear in the number of parties, polynomial in the security parameter and polynomial in the size of the circuit. By using Fiat-Shamir-transformed discrete-log-based zero-knowledge proofs we achieve security against active adversaries in the random oracle model while preserving the number of 4 rounds. Based on this actively secure protocol we construct an end-to-end verifiable tally-hiding E-voting system that has quasi-linear time complexity in the number of voters.
"Voter verifiability" is a notion offered by some electronic voting schemes, which develops into an important issue of democracy in the electronic world. The idea is to endow each voter with the facility of verifying that his vote is counted correctly. The check mechanism for the correct count of the vote can be provided by means of a voting receipt. On the other hand, whenever one has a receipt that serves to check the correct casting and tallying of the vote, it can also be used as the proof for the content of the vote. This may lead to voter coercion and ballot-selling, which in turn injures democracy. Hence, previous versions of the electronic voting schemes have avoided giving receipts to the voters, and introduced the concept of receipt-freeness as an integral part of the voting system. Nonetheless, e-voting can only be made to work if voters trust in the system, and receipts are useful in building this trust. "Pret a Voter" is an e-voting scheme proposed by Chaum, Ryan et al, which provides voter verifiability without any threat of voter coercion and ballot-selling; because, the receipt does not tell anything about the content of the vote to anybody except for the voter himself. The last version, "Pret a Voter: All-In-One" scheme proposed in 2007 also solves the problem of handling the Single Transferable Voting (STV) elections efficiently. We focus on STV elections and propose a protocol modification for the elections; in which political parties, whose votes remain below a certain barrier, are eliminated. Our proposal prevents the loss of votes used for the eliminated parties and distributes them securely to the second or higher choices of their voters. This protocol is then applied to the Pret a Voter: All-In-One scheme, which we suitably modify to enhance the security of its ballot-construction phase. We finally adapt the STV protocol to Turkish parliamentary elections, by taking into consideration the present details of the tallying strategy within each election region.
