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"Dynamic Process Tracing Methods in the Study of Political Decision Making" published on by Oxford University Press.

Whether people make the right choice when they vote for a given candidate or party and what factors affect the capacity to vote correctly have been recurrent questions in the political science literature. This paper contributes to this debate by looking at how the complexity of the electoral context affects voters' capacity to vote correctly. Correct voting is defined as a vote that maximizes one's payoffs in lab elections with monetary incentives. We examine two aspects of the electoral context: district magnitude and the distribution of preferences within the electorate. The main finding is that the frequency of correct voting is much higher in single-member than in multi-member district elections. As soon as there is more than one single seat to be allocated, voters have more difficulty figuring out whether they should vote sincerely for their preferred party or opt strategically for another party in order to maximize their payoffs. By contrast, the distribution of preferences within the electorate has no significant effect.

Cover -- Contents -- List of Illustrations -- List of Tables -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- List of Abbreviations -- Part I. Introduction and Descriptive Background -- 1. Social Communication and Voting Behavior -- 2 Latin American Political Discussion in Comparative Perspective -- Part II. Social Influence and the Vote -- 3. Voter Volatility and Stability in Presidential Campaigns -- 4. Discussion Networks, Campaign Effects, and Vote Choice -- 5. Neighborhoods and Cities as Arenas of Social Influence -- 6. Discussion and the Regionalization of Voter Preferences -- Part III. Implications of a Horizontally Networked World -- 7. Clientelism as the Purchase of Social Influence -- 8. Discussion, Societal Exclusion, and Political Voice -- 9. Conclusion -- Appendix A. Statistical Results -- Appendix B. Measurement of Variables -- Appendix C. Details of Correct-Voting Analyses -- Notes -- References -- Index.

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 ...

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.

In districts where only one seat is contested, the electoral formula (plurality or majority) should be a major determinant of the number of parties that receive votes. Specifically, plurality rule should generate two-party competition while other institutional arrangements should generate electoral fragmentation. Yet tests of these propositions using district-level data have focused on a limited number of cases; they rarely contrast different electoral systems and have reached mixed conclusions. This study analyses district-level data from 6,745 single-member district election contests from 53 democratic countries to test the evidence for Duverger's Law and Hypothesis. Double-ballot majoritarian systems have large numbers of candidates, as predicted, but while the average outcome under plurality rule is generally consistent with two-party competition, it is not perfectly so. The two largest parties typically dominate the districts (generally receiving more than 90 per cent of the vote), and there is very little support for parties finishing fourth or worse. Yet third-place parties do not completely disappear, and ethnic divisions shape party fragmentation levels, even under plurality rule. Finally, institutional rules that generate multiparty systems elsewhere in the country increase electoral fragmentation in single-member plurality districts. Adapted from the source document.

"Voter Information Processing and Political Decision Making" published on by Oxford University Press.

Evidence on the extent to which prejudice serves as a barrier to black and Latino candidates for office is mixed. Some research has found that black and Latino candidates are disadvantaged in terms of their chances of winning election and that they are evaluated differently by voters, while other findings suggest that this may not be the case. This article examines the effects of racial prejudice on candidate evaluation and voting behavior. It uses a unique experimental design to test for direct effects of prejudice on candidate evaluation and voting behavior, as well as indirect effects of prejudice on these variables via the information that subjects seek out. I find that subjects higher in symbolic racism are less likely to vote "correctly" when their preferences most closely align with a black or Latino candidate and that they rate minority candidates more negatively than their white counterparts. I also find that subjects high in prejudice search for less information about minority candidates and that this less robust information search mediates the relationship between prejudice and candidate evaluation and vote measures. Results also suggest that increased information search may mitigate the effects of prejudice on correct voting.

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.

Condcrcet's criterion states that an alternative that defeats every other by a simple majority is the socially optimal choice. Condorcet argued that if the object of voting is to determine the "best" decision for society but voters sometimes make mistakes in their judgments, then the majority alternative (if it exists) is statistically most likely to be the best choice. Strictly speaking, this claim is not true; in some situations Bordas rule gives a sharper estimate of the best alternative. Nevertheless, Condorcet did propose a novel and statistically correct rule for finding the most likely ranking of the alternatives. This procedure, which is sometimes known as "Kemeny's rule," is the unique social welfare function that satisfies a variant of independence of irrelevant alternatives together with several other standard properties.

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 study of the territorial distribution of votes in elections has become an important field of the political party research in recent years. Quantitative studies on the homogeneity of votes and turnout employ different indicators of territorial variance, but despite important progresses in measurement, many of them are sensitive to size and number of political parties or electoral districts. This article proposes a new 'standardised party nationalisation score', which is based on the Gini coefficient of inequalities in distribution. Different from previous indicators, the standardised party nationalisation score weights for the sizes of territorial units (such as electoral districts) within a country, and considers the different numbers of territorial units in different countries. [Copyright Elsevier Ltd.]