In online social networks, the audience size commanded by an organization or an individual is a critical measure of that entity’s popularity and this measure has important economic and/or political implications. Such efforts to measure popularity of users or exploit knowledge about their audience are complicated by the presence of fake profiles on these networks. In this study, analysis of 62 million publicly available Twitter user profiles was conducted and a strategy to identify automatically generated fake profiles was established. Using (...) a combination of a pattern-matching algorithm on screen-names and an analysis of update times, a reasonable number of highly reliable fake user accounts were identified. Analysis of profile creation times and URLs of these fake accounts revealed their distinct behavior relative to a ground truth data set. The characteristics of friends and followers of users in the two data sets further revealed the very different nature of the two groups. The ratio of number of followers-to-friends for ground truth users was ∼1, consistent with past observations, while the fake profiles had a median ratio ∼30, indicating that the fake users we identified were primarily focused on gathering friends. An analysis of the temporal evolution of accounts over 2 years showed that the friends-to-followers ratio increased over time for fake profiles while they decreased for ground truth users. Our results, thus, suggest that a profile-based approach can be used for identifying a core set of fake online social network users in a time-efficient manner. (shrink)

Voters have many motivations. Some vote on the issues. They vote for a candidate because they share that candidate's policy positions. Some vote on performance. They vote for a candidate because they think that candidate will produce the best outcomes in office. Some vote on group identities. They vote for a candidate because that candidate is connected to their social group. This paper is about these motivations. I address three questions. First, which of these motivations, were it widespread, would (...) be best for intrinsic democratic values? Second, how do the motivations of actual American voters affect the value of American democracy? Third, what motivations should individual American voters have? I argue that widespread issue voting would be best, followed by performance voting, followed by group voting. I argue that American voters do not much contribute to the value of American democracy. Their behavior makes it hard to achieve many democratic values. Finally, I argue that, were America an ideal democracy, American voters would have reason to vote on the issues. But, in their non-ideal democracy, American voters merely have reason to avoid voting on privileged group identities. (shrink)

Abstract If voters do not understand the programs of rival candidates or their likely consequences, they cannot rationally exercise control over government. An ignorant electorate cannot achieve true democratic control over public policy. The immense size and scope of modern government makes it virtually impossible for voters to acquire sufficient knowledge to exercise such control. The problem is exacerbated by voters? strong incentive to be ?rationally ignorant? of politics. This danger to democracy cannot readily be circumvented through (...) ?shortcut? methods of economizing on voter knowledge costs. A truly democratic government must, therefore, be strictly limited in scope. (shrink)

This paper investigates why some legislators tend to switch parties frequently while others tend to stay put. On the assumption that the ultimate goal of legislators is to be reelected, I argue that voters' demands for local/individual benefits, or pork, and legislators' lack of access to resources for such benefits are likely to lead the legislators to switch parties in order to improve their electoral chances in the subsequent election. By analyzing party switches by legislators from 1988 to 2008 (...) in South Korea, where the president controls access to the pork pipeline, I find that the president's party members are less likely and independents are more likely to change party affiliations, irrespective of voter demands for pork or national public policies. However, I also find that opposition party legislators who are elected from less-developed districts, where voters tend to desire pork over policy, are more likely to switch parties than those elected from more-developed districts. These findings suggest that interaction between voter demands and party access to resources influences politicians’ party loyalty: voter demands for pork (or policy) tend to lead politicians to be less (or more) loyal to their current parties. Voter demands, however, have little impact on the party loyalty of those who are already in parties with access to the pork pipeline. (shrink)

Concern about declining turnout in US. presidential elections has prompted educators to reexamine the civics curriculum in an effort to increase student interest in voting. This study examines an Arizona-based program, Kids Voting (KV), which ties classroom instruction to political discussions between student and parent at home. The program also seeks to boost turnout by encouraging parents to bring their school-age children to the polls, where the students can vote in a mock election while the parents cast official ballots. This (...) study used a multi-methodological approach to judge the impact of KV on the 1990 statewide election in Arizona. The program was found to be well-regarded by participating students, faculty and parents. It appeared to have the potential to contribute to a small increase in turnout. It also may have a cumulative impact if used in succeeding elections. The program, which is being expanded to many other states, deserves further scrutiny. (shrink)

This edited volume, Voters & Voting in Context, is a comprehensive study of voter behavior that concentrates on surveys and other data linked to the 2009 and 2013 German general elections. The indi...

The increasing awareness of the incommensurability between voters’ attitudes about voting and the reality of voting are contributing to the much written-about voter malaise which plagues U.S. elections. Voters who assume their role is to determine the ideal, right, or best candidate confront an election system in our current communication environment that attempts to market candidates to match voters’ ideals, while also providing a surfeit of information that both contradicts the ideal depictions while also making transparent the (...) process by which candidates are packaged. This essay identifies four communication phenomena that contribute to this malaise: campaign transparency; bifurcation of issue and candidate; the abstracted nature of news content; and the glut of information that characterizes our present communication environment. (shrink)

The discussion on mandatory turnout, which controversially introduces coercion at the heart of the electoral process, illustrates a dilemma between increasing voter turnout on the one hand and avoiding coercion on the other. If successful, a recent proposal by Elliott solves this dilemma as it removes the compulsory element of mandatory turnout. Specifically, Elliot reinterprets the policy’s purpose as (a) a pre-commitment device for those who believe that they have a duty to vote and (b) a nudge to the surveillance (...) of politics for those who do not believe this. We critically evaluate Elliott’s novel intervention in the debate and argue that it is ultimately unsuccessful. Mandatory turnout can be interpreted as neither a pre-commitment device nor a nudge. Moreover, we present a more promising and novel solution to the dilemma: a genuine state-administered pre-commitment device with respect to voting that also nudges citizens to vote and seems _prima facie_ attractive. (shrink)

Ever since its inception, democracy has been subjected to the objection that ordinary citizens are not fit to rule. I discuss and criticize the most influential contemporary version of this argument, due to Jason Brennan, according to which democracy is illegitimate because voters are incompetent. I accept two core premises of Brennan’s argument – that legitimacy requires competence, and that voters are incompetent (in the sense of competence Brennan accepts) – but reject the conclusion that representative democracy is (...) illegitimate. I show that the argument can be interpreted as making two different claims: (1) That the democratic policymaking process as a whole is incompetent, and democratic policies therefore illegitimate; (2) that only democratic elections are incompetent, which either (a) makes democratic policies illegitimate or (b) makes elections themselves illegitimate. Each of these claims is false: (1) is false because voter incompetence does not taint the policymaking process sufficiently; (2a) is false because incompetent elections do not imply that policies made post-election are illegitimate; and (2b) is false because electoral decisions are not the kinds of things that can be illegitimate in the appropriate way. Finally, I address three potential criticisms of my defense of democracy: (i) that I set the bar for voters’ performance too low, (ii) that the representative democracy I defend is not really democratic, and (iii) that Brennan’s argument is an argument for replacing democracy with epistocracy, rather than for the illegitimacy of representative democracy. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIlya Somin's case for smaller government and “foot voting” rests on at least two questionable assumptions. The first is that voter ignorance is based on rational calculation. This assumption requires arbitrary stipulations about the degree of voter altruism and the low values voters assign to the victory of their candidates. The second is that voter ignorance betokens bad public policy. But there is plenty of evidence to the contrary. How can this be the case? One explanation is that individually (...) ignorant voters are small pieces of a large system that divides intellectual labor through discussions among elites, opinion leaders, and ordinary citizens. This system may entitle voters to trust in the opinions of others, sparing them the need to be well informed. (shrink)

Against this background, Matching Voters With Parties and Candidates aims first at a comprehensive overview of the VAA phenomenon in a truly comparative perspective.

Who is responsible for growing political polarization? To many, the answer is obvious: Irrational voters are to blame. This irrationality results in motivated, in-group reasoning that only serves to further deepen the political divide. In this piece, I examine a perspective that holds that polarization results, not from irrationality, but from rational responses by voters to their limited epistemic resources.

The prevailing theory states that either Japanese voters have stopped ideologically distinguishing parties or that the main political parties in Japan have become more centrist in recent years. These arguments are based on survey questions asking citizens to locate parties on an ideological scale. However, these questions may suffer from noise caused by respondents who misinterpret the question wording or answer the questions inappropriately to mask their misunderstanding of the terms and . To address this problem by extracting only (...) the views of those who know the meaning of leftright terminology largely perceived parties’ ideologies in the same way as experts. Additionally, I find that even these voters face difficulties in placing ambiguous or new parties on the political spectrum. This study has implications not only for understanding trends in Japanese political ideology, but also for survey design and analysis of heterogeneous survey responses. (shrink)

From a 1996 survey comparing the views of economists and ordinary voters, Bryan Caplan deduces several biases—anti‐market, anti‐foreign, pessimistic, and makework biases—to support his thesis that voters are rationally irrational, i.e., that, aware of the inconsequentiality of their votes, they rationally indulge their “preferences” for public policies that have harmful results. Yet if the standard of comparison is the public’s opposition to harmful policies, rather than the level of its opposition relative to that of economists, the “biases” disappear. (...) In absolute terms, voters support free trade and are against protectionism, such that free‐trade agreements are more prevalent among democratic, rather than autocratic, regimes. Finally, the protectionist policies that are adopted in this country are the product of interest‐group politics, not of voters’ wrongheaded policy preferences. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn Democracy and Political Ignorance, Ilya Somin argues that the supposed informational advantages of “foot voting”—exercising exit options and making market-based choices—over voting at the ballot box tell in favor of decentralizing and limiting government. But the evidence Somin offers for the superiority of “foot voting,” based on an analysis of the politics of the Jim Crow-era South, is unpersuasive and internally inconsistent. Second, even if Somin is correct that foot voters have greater incentives to acquire information than ballot-box (...) voters do, this would not in itself be a good reason to favor foot voting. For Somin shows little interest in considering why we might value democratic decision making. Thus, Somin's argument is unlikely to persuade anyone not already committed to the superiority of market-based solutions to social and political problems. (shrink)

A multimillion-dollar digital voter deterrence ad industry has emerged in the United States. Beginning with the 2016 US Presidential Election, interested parties ranging from international intelligence agencies to campaigning politicians have enlisted social media platforms’ microtargeted advertising infrastructure to inundate certain voter demographics with anti-voting content. These tactics are used disproportionately against people of color, especially Black voters, and remain virtually unregulated and unaddressed. This paper responds to the issue in two ways. First, I strive to catalyze a broader (...) awareness of this practice and the intertwined moral and epistemic wrongs that it entails. The wrongs of this digital industry occur simultaneously at three levels: individually, these types of ads undermine autonomy; socially, they constitute the perpetration of discriminatory voter suppression and epistemic injustice; and historically, they reify racial inequality by perpetuating targeted disenfranchisement efforts against non-white voters. Second, I argue that this type of content is instructive for the ongoing debate regarding social media platforms’ moderation of online political speech. The arguments I develop here provide a compelling case for the moderation of political content that seeks to disenfranchise, especially when those efforts are undertaken in discriminatory ways. This holds urgent implications for how social media platforms moderate and profit from suppressive content. (shrink)

Before an election, two candidates choose policies which are lotteries over electionday distributive positions. I find conditions under which there exist mixed-strategy probabilistic-voting equilibria which are independent, treating voter groups independently.

On 30 June 1994 the Social Democratic Party of Japan (SDPJ, formerly the Japan Socialist Party) joined its historic enemy, the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), to form a coalition government in a Japanese equivalent of Italy's . Competition between the conservative LDP and the progressive socialists had defined the Japanese party system since 1955. In this paper we analyze voter reactions to this and other confusing events surrounding the end of the LDP's 38-year dominance. We find, first, that the Japanese (...) electorate was able to make sense of these events. The political space reflected in public opinion mapped the political space reflected in the mass media remarkably well. Secondly, our findings support the idea that attitudes toward political parties are endogenous to the political process: strategic moves by political actors alter the political space within which they maneuver. Coalitions of strange bedfellows force voters to revise their perceptions of political space and reevaluate their attitudes toward the actors involved. Strange bedfellows seemed less strange, friendlier after they had been seen in bed together. (shrink)

It is widely believed that democracies require knowledgeable citizens to function well. But the most politically knowledgeable individuals also tend to be the most partisan, and the strength of partisan identity tends to corrupt political thinking. This creates a conundrum. On the one hand, an informed citizenry is allegedly necessary for a democracy to flourish. On the other hand, the most knowledgeable and passionate voters are also the most likely to think in corrupted, biased ways. What to do? This (...) paper examines this tension and draws out several lessons. First, it is not obvious that more knowledgeable voters will make better political decisions. Second, attempts to remedy voter ignorance are problematic because partisans tend to become more polarized when they acquire more information. Third, solutions to citizen incompetence must focus on the intellectual virtue of objectivity. Fourth, some forms of epistocracy are troubling, in part, because they would increase the political power of the most dogmatic and biased individuals. Fifth, a highly restrictive form of epistocracy may escape the problem of political dogmatism, but epistocrats may face a steeper tradeoff between inclusivity and epistemic virtue than many would like. (shrink)

What should we do if climate change or global injustice require radical policy changes not supported by the majority of citizens? And what if science shows that the lacking support is largely due to shortcomings in citizens’ individual psychology such as cognitive biases that lead to temporal and geographical parochialism? Could then a plausible case for enhancing the morality of the electorate—even against their will –be made? But can a democratic government manipulate the will of the people without losing democratic (...) legitimacy? This paper explores the problems that governmental manipulation of voters pose for democratic legitimacy and the tensions between non-manipulated input and morally acceptable output. These venerable issues of political theory resurface in light of recent suggestions to tackle today’s global mega-problems by Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu. They suggest that to avert the looming catastrophe, governments should alter psychological traits of the citizenry through biomedical means, from pharmaceuticals to genetics. However, we argue that a government cannot rule with democratic legitimacy if elected by a will of the people it manipulated before. Normatively, conferring power from the governed onto governors is a one-directional relation that is incompatible with manipulation. But while it is tempting to rebut suggestions to morally enhance the people as antithetical to essential ideas of democracy, swift rebuttals tend to overlook the deeper challenge: Majoritarian decision-making may lead to inacceptable outcomes. The dilemma between input and output runs through major works in political theory. Rather than wishfully ignoring the dangers of democracy, democratic theory has to provide answers. (shrink)

In recent years, the receipt and the perception of information has changed in ways which have fueled fears about the fates of our democracies. However, real information on these possibilities or the direction of these changes does not exist. Into this gap, Hahn and colleagues bring the power of Condorcet's (1785) Jury Theorem to show that changes in our information networks have affected voter inter‐dependence so that it is likely that voters are now collectively more ignorant even if individual (...) voter competence remains unchanged. (shrink)

The most puzzling aspect of Social Choice theory[1] is that people cooperate much more than the theory suggests. There are several reasons why this is so, including the fact that people are not always rational -- particularly by the definition of "rational" used by the Social Choice theorists! Another obvious reason is that people act out of ignorance much of the time.

This book develops and empirically tests a social theory of political participation. It overturns prior understandings of why some people vote more often than others. The book shows that the standard demographic variables are not proxies for variation in the individual costs and benefits of participation, but for systematic variation in the patterns of social ties between potential voters. Potential voters who move in larger social circles, particularly those including politicians and other mobilizing actors, have more access to (...) the flurry of electoral activity prodding citizens to vote and increasing political discussion. Treating voting as a socially defined practice instead of as an individual choice over personal payoffs, a social theory of participation is derived from a mathematical model with behavioral foundations that is empirically calibrated and tested using multiple methods and data sources. (shrink)

This paper is concerned with selecting an appropriate perspective from which to understand and evaluate social-decision procedures. Distinguishing between "agent rationality" and "option-rationality", the author argues that a rational agent may choose a social-decision procedure that is not itself agent-rational (but merely option-rational). The argument puts the voter's paradox in a context allowing evaluation of (a) its general import and (b) practical proposals for avoiding it in particular cases. Arrow's four conditions for a social-decision procedure are shown to have little (...) relevance to the understanding or evaluation of constitutions. The author concludes that the more fruitful perspective for discussing social-decision procedures is that of option-rationality rather than (as Arrow, Wolff, and others have supposed) that of agent-rationality. (shrink)

Wishful thinking (WT) of Israeli voters was measured in the unprecedented event of three failing national elections repeated within one year. WT is considered as Type 1 fast/intuitive thinking leading to bias. A novel method for measuring WT – including relevant campaign information and distinguishing between “WT for self” and “WT for others” – was introduced. WT components of voters in leading and trailing camps were compared across the three elections to examine whether patterns would be consistent or (...) haphazard. Despite the presumed uncontrolled nature of WT, the patterns were not haphazard but rather consistent. We also tried to debias WT by applying a novel variation of incentive intervention to shift respondents from fast thinking to slow, rational Type 2 thinking. Unlike past studies, the method was extremely effective in debiasing WT and leading to realistic predictions. However, this was true only for self-WT and not for WT for others. (shrink)

Do democratic systems that include binding referendum and initiative processes violate a core principle of democracy, namely that legislators should be accountable? Some have argued that they do: these popular vote processes would grant the right to legislate to ordinary voters even though they cannot be held accountable—i.e., face possible consequences imposed by others for their actions and decisions. As a result, we should favor conventional representative systems over systems with popular vote processes. In this article, I analyze this (...) ‘accountability objection’ to referendums and initiatives and the conception of voters as ‘legislators’ on which it relies and argue that it does not withstand scrutiny. I first demonstrate that there is no sound basis to characterize only voters in popular votes, and not voters in elections, as ‘legislators’. Therefore, the scope of the objection is broader than anticipated by its proponents: it cannot be consistently used to dismiss popular votes without also being fatal to elections. I then argue that voters’ lack of accountability is not fatal to either mass voting process. The institutional role of ordinary voters provides them with co-lawmaking powers; but these are not the kind of special powers that justify holding certain actors accountable in democratic systems. This does not exclude that voters have responsibilities. I close by highlighting that, compared to conventional representative systems, democratic systems including well-designed popular vote processes could offer voters more supportive conditions to meet such possible responsibilities. (shrink)

In this paper, we analyze how citizens evaluate their president, especially focusing on why voters lower their evaluations at an individual-level perspective. We assert that citizens raise their evaluations of a new president when their expectations are met and lower their opinions when his or her performance disappoints them. Furthermore, the evaluations of the president are not only affected by a government's economic and diplomatic performance, but are also influenced by individual awareness of salient political issues, the contents of (...) the news, and their own perceived influence on politics. We test the theoretical hypotheses using Taiwan's Election and Democratization Study panel survey data. The statistical results support our theoretical hypotheses and show that when President Ma's performance did not meet respondents media exposure and political efficacy are significantly associated with the change in their opinions of Ma. (shrink)

A common criticism of plurality voting is that it fails to reflect the degree of intensity with which voters prefer the candidate or policy that they vote for. To rectify this, many critics of plurality voting have argued that vote buying should be allowed. Persons with more intense preferences for a candidate could buy votes from persons with less intense preferences for the opposing candidate and then cast them for the candidate that they intensely support. This paper argues that (...) instead of better reflecting voters’ weighted preferences, vote buying will lead to electoral outcomes that reflect them less accurately. (shrink)

The dependence of socio-political stability on the emotional expectations of voters is investigated. For this, a model of a socio-political system consisting of a society of voters and a democratically elected politician is considered. The neuropsychological model of the voter takes into account his emotional expectations. The social stability is guaranteed by the expectations of positive emotions of all voters. Socio-political stability means both the social stability and the re-election of politician. One type of voter is a (...) Progressist who seeks to fulfil his desires. It is shown that for the socio-political stability of the Progressist society, is enough a supportive environment. Another type of voter—a Phobic works in a fearful environment. It is shown that for the socio-political stability of the Phobic’s society, regular impacts that support their phobias are sufficient. As an example, emotional expectations, socio-political stability and information management in Eastern Europe are considered. The management of phobias in a weak economy is investigated. It is shown that in the absence of regular impacts supporting phobias a Phobic turns into a Progressist. Then the socio-political system becomes unstable with a weak economy and growth limits. The classification of the main social threats and phobias is given. The socio-political consequences of creating phobias, including corporate psychopaths and toxic leaders, are examined. Ways are proposed to resolve the contradiction between increased consumption and growth limits without the use of phobias, using high humanitarian technologies. (shrink)

Abstract Ilya Somin finds in the public's ignorance of policy issues a reason to reduce the size and scope of government. But one cannot restrict the range of issues that may be raised in a democracy without it ceasing to be a democracy. Jeffrey Friedman argues that, since feedback on the quality of private goods is superior to feedback on the quality of public policies, ?privatizing? public decisions might improve their quality. However, the quality of feedback depends upon the nature (...) of the good, not who provides it; and the absence of reliable feedback on a good may actually justify government involvement, to correct information asymmetries. More fundamentally, voter ignorance of policy issues is a problem only if we assume that the point of democracy is to secure voter control of policy. Max Weber, however, advocated democracy as the best available mechanism for securing strong and responsible leadership. (shrink)

It is often claimed that democratic voters have epistemic responsibilities. However, it is not often specified why voters have such epistemic responsibilities. In this paper, I contend that voters have epistemic responsibilities because voting is best understood as an act that bears assertoric force. More precisely, voters perform what I call an act of political advocacy whereby, like an asserter who states or affirms that something is the case, they state or affirm that a certain course (...) of political action is the one that should be followed or enacted. Consequently, the performance of acts of political advocacy such as voting should be understood as bounded by epistemic norms mirroring those binding the act of assertion and yield epistemic responsibilities mirroring the ones required to satisfy these norms. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The study of voter competence has made significant contributions to our understanding of politics, but at this point there are diminishing returns to the endeavor. There is little reason, in theory or in practice, to expect voter competence to improve dramatically enough to make much of a difference, but there is reason to think that officials? competence can vary enough to make large differences. To understand variations in government performance, therefore, we would do better to focus on the abilities (...) and performance of officials, not ordinary citizens. (shrink)

Abstract Democratic control of public policy is nearly impossible in the presence of extreme voter ignorance, and this ignorance is in part caused by the vast size and scope of modern government. Only a government limited in its scope can be meaningfully democratic. David Ciepley's response to my article does not seriously challenge this conclusion, and his attempts to show that limited government is inherently undemocratic fail. Ciepley's alternative vision of a ?democracy? that does not require informed voters turns (...) out to be not a defense of democracy at all, but a rationalization for any form of government that achieves a high level of leadership skill and bureaucratic efficiency. (shrink)

Voter surveillance for digital campaigning is perceived as enacted from above. Political parties are “all-seeing actors” combining access to the Voters’ Registry with digital tools to maximize voter turnout. At the same time, new forms of lateral surveillance emerge as citizens voluntarily participate in the data collection process to help political parties achieve their electoral goals. This article examines the reconfiguration of the concepts of crowdsourcing and political participation through the use of voter-surveillance applications. Theoretically, it explores how crowdsourced (...) voter surveillance (CVS) builds on the emancipatory rhetoric of political participation and crowdsourcing while relying on social, technical, and political surveillance infrastructures. Empirically, it maps the information flows and knowledge hierarchies afforded by Elector, a CVS app used by the Likud party in the Israeli election of March 2020. The findings indicate that contrary to the logic of crowdsourcing as democratizing knowledge and participation, CVS cultivates controlled individuals and normalizes lateral surveillance as a ritualistic and desired form of political participation. The article therefore describes the type of political action that CVS constructs as Little Samaritan Brothers: citizens who collectively resign their rights and the rights of their peers for the party’s success. (shrink)

Procedural justifications of democracy emphasize inclusiveness and respect and by doing so come into conflict with instrumental justifications that depend on voters’ competence. This conflict raises questions about jury theorems and makes their standing in democratic theory contested. We show that a type of no-regret learning called meta-induction can help to satisfy the competence assumption without excluding voters or diverse opinion leaders on an a priori basis. Meta-induction assigns weights to opinion leaders based on their past predictive performance (...) to determine the level of their inclusion in recommendations for voters. The weighting minimizes the difference between the performance of meta-induction and the best opinion leader in hindsight. The difference represents the regret of meta-induction whose minimization ensures that the recommendations are optimal in supporting voters’ competence. Meta-induction has optimal truth-tracking properties that support voters’ competence even if it is targeted by mis/disinformation and should be considered a tool for supporting democracy in hyper-plurality. (shrink)

In this paper, we argue that the widespread practice in the United States of busing voters to the polling station on Election Day is an instance of paying people to vote. We defend a definition of what it means to pay people to vote, and on this definition, busing voters to the polling station is an instance of paying people to vote. Paying people to vote is illegal according to United States federal election law. However, the United States (...) courts have historically considered the practice of busing voters to the polling station legally permissible. The United States legal system, therefore, faces a dilemma: either the courts must change their interpretation of current federal election law such that busing voters to the polling station is a violation of federal election law, or federal election law must be changed so that at least some instances of paying people to vote are legally permissible. We argue that choosing either horn of the dilemma has a controversial implication for the United States legal system. (shrink)

In recent years, housing costs have outpaced incomes in the United States, resulting in millions of eviction filings each year. Yet no study has examined the link between eviction and voting. Drawing on a novel data set that combines tens of millions of eviction and voting records, this article finds that residential eviction rates negatively impacted voter turnout during the 2016 presidential election. Results from a generalized additive model show eviction’s effect on voter turnout to be strongest in neighborhoods with (...) relatively low rates of displacement. To address endogeneity bias and estimate the causal effect of eviction on voting, the analysis treats commercial evictions as an instrument for residential evictions, finding that increases in neighborhood eviction rates led to substantial declines in voter turnout. This study demonstrates that the impact of eviction reverberates far beyond housing loss, affecting democratic participation. (shrink)

We consider a singular event of the following form: in a simple voting game, a particular division of the voters resulted in a positive outcome. We propose a plausible measure that quantifies the causal contribution of any given voter to the outcome. This measure is based on a conceptual analysis due to Braham [1], but differs from his solution to the problem of measuring causality of singular events.

Political polarisation in the United States offers opportunities to explore how beliefs about candidates – that they could save or destroy American society – impact people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviour. Participants forecast their future emotional responses to the contentious 2020 U.S. presidential election, and reported their actual responses after the election outcome. Stronger beliefs about candidates were associated with forecasts of greater emotion in response to the election, but the strength of this relationship differed based on candidate preference. Trump supporters’ (...) forecast happiness more strongly related to beliefs that their candidate would save society than for Biden supporters. Biden supporters’ forecast anger and fear were more strongly related to beliefs that Trump would destroy society than vice versa. These forecasts mattered: predictions of lower happiness and greater anger if the non-preferred candidate won predicted voting, with Biden supporters voting more than Trump supporters. Generally, participants forecast more emotion than they experienced, but beliefs altered this tendency. Stronger beliefs predicted experiencing more happiness or more anger and fear about the election outcome than had been forecast. These findings have implications for understanding the mechanisms through which political polarisation and rhetoric can influence voting behaviour. (shrink)

This chapter explores the relationship between Goldman's thesis and the classical jury theorem. It identifies the minimal modification needed in order to recover Goldman's thesis in a Condorcetian framework. Goldman's thesis can be recast as a generalization of the classical Condorcet jury theorem. The central move needed to recover Goldman's thesis from a generalized jury theorem is to replace Condorcet's assumption that there is a single truth to be tracked with the assumption of multiple such truths: one for each voter. (...) In Goldman's picture, there is still an indirect, derivative sense in which there exists an 'overall' truth about the correct outcome for the electorate in aggregate. This 'overall' truth is determined, of course, by the profile of voter‐specific truths and therefore depends on the identity of the electorate. The chapter also provides some numerical examples to illustrate the implications of the generalized jury theorem. (shrink)

Political candidates often believe they must focus their campaign efforts on a small number of swing voters open for ideological change. Based on the wisdom of opinion polls, this might seem like a good idea. But do most voters really hold their political attitudes so firmly that they are unreceptive to persuasion? We tested this premise during the most recent general election in Sweden, in which a left- and a right-wing coalition were locked in a close race. We (...) asked our participants to state their voter intention, and presented them with a political survey of wedge issues between the two coalitions. Using a sleight-of-hand we then altered their replies to place them in the opposite political camp, and invited them to reason about their attitudes on the manipulated issues. Finally, we summarized their survey score, and asked for their voter intention again. The results showed that no more than 22% of the manipulated replies were detected, and that a full 92% of the participants accepted and endorsed our altered political survey score. Furthermore, the final voter intention question indicated that as many as 48% (69.2%) were willing to consider a left-right coalition shift. This can be contrasted with the established polls tracking the Swedish election, which registered maximally 10% voters open for a swing. Our results indicate that political attitudes and partisan divisions can be far more flexible than what is assumed by the polls, and that people can reason about the factual issues of the campaign with considerable openness to change. (shrink)