Modeling Multiparty Elections, Preference Classes and Strategic Voting

Modeling Multiparty Elections, Preference Classes and Strategic Voting PDF Author: Ed Fieldhouse
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Modeling Multiparty Elections, Preference Classes and Strategic Voting

Modeling Multiparty Elections, Preference Classes and Strategic Voting PDF Author: Ed Fieldhouse
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 90

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Book Description


Models of Multiparty Electoral Competition

Models of Multiparty Electoral Competition PDF Author: K. Shepsle
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135646082
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 112

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Book Description
Kenneth A. Shepsle surveys the formal literature on multiparty electoral competition.

Multi-Level Electoral Politics

Multi-Level Electoral Politics PDF Author: Sona N. Golder
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192509187
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
National-level elections receive more attention from scholars and the media than elections at other levels, even though in many European countries the importance of both regional and European levels of government has grown in recent years. The growing importance of multiple electoral arenas suggests that scholars should be cautious about examining single levels in isolation. Taking the multilevel structure of electoral politics seriously requires a re-examination of how the incentives created by electoral institutions affect the behaviour of voters and party elites. The standard approach to analysing multilevel elections is the second-order election (SOE) model, in which national elections are considered to be first-order elections while other elections are second order. However, this model does not provide micro mechanisms that determine how elections in one arena affect those in another, or explain variations in individual voting behaviour. The objective of this book is to explain how party and voter behaviour in a given election is affected by the existence of multiple electoral arenas. It provides original qualitative and quantitative data to examine European, national, and subnational elections in France, Germany, and Spain from 2011-2015. The volume examines party mobilization efforts across multiple electoral arenas, as well as decisions by individual voters with respect to turnout, strategic voting, and accountability. This book provides the first systematic analysis of multilevel electoral politics at three different levels across multiple countries. Comparative Politics is a series for researchers, teachers, and students of political science that deals with contemporary government and politics. Global in scope, books in the series are characterised by a stress on comparative analysis and strong methodological rigour. The series is published in association with the European Consortium for Political Research. For more information visit: www.ecprnet.eu. The series is edited by Emilie van Haute, Professor of Political Science, Université libre de Bruxelles; Ferdinand Müller-Rommel, Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University; and Susan Scarrow, Chair of the Department of Political Science, University of Houston.

Making Multicandidate Elections More Democratic

Making Multicandidate Elections More Democratic PDF Author: Samuel Merrill
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400859506
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
This book addresses a significant area of applied social-choice theory--the evaluation of voting procedures designed to select a single winner from a field of three or more candidates. Such procedures can differ strikingly in the election outcomes they produce, the opportunities for manipulation that they create, and the nature of the candidates--centrist or extremist--whom they advantage. The author uses computer simulations based on models of voting behavior and reconstructions of historical elections to assess the likelihood that each multicandidate voting system meets political objectives. Alternative procedures abound: the single-vote plurality method, ubiquitous in the United States, Canada, and Britain; runoff, used in certain primaries; the Borda count, based on rank scores submitted by each voter; approval voting, which permits each voter to support several candidates equally; and the Hare system of successive eliminations, to name a few. This work concludes that single-vote plurality is most often at odds with the majoritarian principle of Condorcet. Those methods most likely to choose the Condorcet candidate under sincere voting are generally the most vulnerable to manipulation. Approval voting and the Hare and runoff methods emerge from the analyses as the most reliable. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Party Competition

Party Competition PDF Author: Michael Laver
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400840325
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 293

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Book Description
Party competition for votes in free and fair elections involves complex interactions by multiple actors in political landscapes that are continuously evolving, yet classical theoretical approaches to the subject leave many important questions unanswered. Here Michael Laver and Ernest Sergenti offer the first comprehensive treatment of party competition using the computational techniques of agent-based modeling. This exciting new technology enables researchers to model competition between several different political parties for the support of voters with widely varying preferences on many different issues. Laver and Sergenti model party competition as a true dynamic process in which political parties rise and fall, a process where different politicians attack the same political problem in very different ways, and where today's political actors, lacking perfect information about the potential consequences of their choices, must constantly adapt their behavior to yesterday's political outcomes. Party Competition shows how agent-based modeling can be used to accurately reflect how political systems really work. It demonstrates that politicians who are satisfied with relatively modest vote shares often do better at winning votes than rivals who search ceaselessly for higher shares of the vote. It reveals that politicians who pay close attention to their personal preferences when setting party policy often have more success than opponents who focus solely on the preferences of voters, that some politicians have idiosyncratic "valence" advantages that enhance their electability--and much more.

Modeling People's Strategic Voting Behavior Using Machine Learning

Modeling People's Strategic Voting Behavior Using Machine Learning PDF Author: Adam Lauz
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
" Voting and preference aggregation systems have been used by people for centuries as tools for group decision-making in settings as diverse as politics and entertainment. Computers have assumed an increasingly significant role as platforms and mediators for preference aggregation, such as scheduling applications aggregating search results from the web and collaborative filtering, and more recently as autonomous voters in multi-agent systems. People's behavior is known to deviate from models that were traditionally used to analyze voting systems. The main goal of this thesis is to model and predict how people will vote in strategic situations which vary the number of voters, the number of candidates, and voters' preferences using machine learning approach. These models can be easily integrated into real systems to improve their voting components to become better and smarter. We use new insights we gather from machine learning methods such as feature importance analysis to modify the models and capture the voting behaviors more accurately. We engineer new features in our models that take into account cognitive biases that affect the behavior of bounded rational voters such as leader-bias. Our results show that the engineered features that describe the voters' properties and not only the voting condition, are significantly effective for building vote prediction models." -- abstract.

The Oxford Handbook of American Elections and Political Behavior

The Oxford Handbook of American Elections and Political Behavior PDF Author: Jan E. Leighley
Publisher: Oxford University Press (UK)
ISBN: 0199604517
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 796

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Book Description
The Oxford Handbooks of American Politics are the essential guide to the study of American political life in the 21st Century. With engaging contributions from the major figures in the field The Oxford Handbook of American Elections and Political Behavior provides the key point of reference for anyone working in American Politics today

The Many Faces of Strategic Voting

The Many Faces of Strategic Voting PDF Author: John H Aldrich
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472901125
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Voters do not always choose their preferred candidate on election day. Often they cast their ballots to prevent a particular outcome, as when their own preferred candidate has no hope of winning and they want to prevent another, undesirable candidate’s victory; or, they vote to promote a single-party majority in parliamentary systems, when their own candidate is from a party that has no hope of winning. In their thought-provoking book The Many Faces of Strategic Voting, Laura B. Stephenson, John H. Aldrich, and André Blais first provide a conceptual framework for understanding why people vote strategically, and what the differences are between sincere and strategic voting behaviors. Expert contributors then explore the many facets of strategic voting through case studies in Great Britain, Spain, Canada, Japan, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, and the European Union.

Votes and Policy Preferences

Votes and Policy Preferences PDF Author: Hanneke Hermsen
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
Why do political parties in democracies choose to stand for one policy platform rather than another? Is it merely a desire for obtaining votes, necessary to acquire government power, or do publicly interested motives also play a role in the policy positioning of parties? In this book, these questions are mainly dealt with through use of formal models, with the effects of this new model formally analyzed, whereupon an application is presented to the Dutch multi-party system.

Party Competition and Voter Priorities in Multi-issue Contexts

Party Competition and Voter Priorities in Multi-issue Contexts PDF Author: Chitralekha Basu
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political activists
Languages : en
Pages : 113

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Book Description
"This dissertation uses formal and statistical methods to analyze the nature of voter priorities and party competition in multi-issue contexts. The first chapter, 'Choosing Your Battles Wisely? Activist Preferences, Party Size and Issue Selection', seeks to explain why parties emphasize particular positional issues in their campaigns. I find that the policy preferences of activists are an important influence on party platforms, and therefore, party emphasis decisions on positional issues. However, my analyses reveal party size to be a more important determinant of parties' emphasis strategies than whether a party is 'mainstream' or 'niche'. Large mainstream parties - termed 'major parties' - de-emphasize issues on which their activists are relatively extreme, whereas both small mainstream and small niche parties - 'minor parties' - emphasize issues on which their activists are relatively extreme. Further, large niche parties appear to behave more like large mainstream parties than small niche parties in this respect. Using a variety of empirical approaches, I show that these findings can be explained as the consequence of vote-maximizing choices made by parties responding to different electorates. Conversely, they cannot easily be explained by strategic error or dogmatism on the part of some parties, or by the selection of activists into parties. These patterns hold across Western and Eastern Europe, suggesting that, in a variety of information environments, the appearance of policy moderation may be viewed as advantageous by major parties, and as potentially disadvantageous by minor parties. The second chapter, 'Policy Bundling: A Model of Party Competition in Multi-Issue Contexts', formally models party strategy in contexts where voter priorities may be influenced by campaigns. The model advances an explanation for two puzzling aspects of parties' issue emphasis decisions. First, much empirical research has established that although parties do focus disproportionately on 'preferred issues' in their campaigns, they also spend much of their time focusing on the same issues, and in particular, on issues already salient to voters. However, formal models have struggled to explain why a party might address an issue on which it is widely perceived as incompetent, or on which its policies are generally unpopular. Second, existing theories of issue selection by parties do not explain what binds certain parties to unpopular positions and others to popular ones - even though positional issues, rather than valence issues, are a substantial focus of parties' campaigns. Building on evidence gathered in the first chapter, I suggest that parties' issue positions may be constrained by the policy preferences of their activists. Thus, if able to influence the importance of issues for voters, parties will prefer to emphasize issues on which the preferences of their activists are, on average, more popular. However, I argue that the extent to which a party emphasizes an issue has two potential consequences: it may not only influence the importance of the issue for voters, but also voters' certainty regarding the party's position on the issue. Consequently, parties must balance two competing incentives in their issue emphasis decisions: emphasizing the issues on which their activists' policy preferences are more popular, so as to increase the electoral salience of these issues, and emphasizing issues that are already salient to voters, in order to ensure that potentially sympathetic voters observe their positions on these issues. In the model, the relative strength of these two incentives determines whether, in equilibrium, we observe parties 'talking past each other' or, instead, 'policy bundling' - when at least one party 'bundles' popular and unpopular policies, while disproportionately emphasizing the former. To the best of my knowledge, this constitutes the only formal model of issue selection which finds that parties may frequently campaign on the same issue in equilibrium, and will campaign on unfavorable issues if these are especially salient to voters - as is consistent with the empirical evidence. The third chapter, 'The (Non) Separability of Policy and Valence in Voter Preferences', investigates the nature of voter priorities in contexts where both valence assessments and policy preferences may be important influences on vote choice. Specifically, I consider whether and how the importance of different valence attributes to voters may vary with their ideological proximity to the party or candidate - or, variation in the separability of valence from policy in voter preferences. Using survey data on British voters between 1997 and 2005, I estimate the separability of three valence attributes from policy for voters: party integrity, leader popularity and party strength. I find that how much a respondent likes the leader of a party is more important to proximate voters, but the integrity of a party is of similar importance to all voters. On the other hand, how capable a party is thought to be of strong government is of more importance to less proximate voters. The findings in this chapter bolster the work of researchers who have argued that the assumption of additive separability does not generalize to all types of valence, and also have implications for when parties might invest in particular valence attributes"--Pages ix-xi.