Voting behavior under proportional representation

Understanding voter preferences in proportional representation (PR) systems is an essential first step towards understanding candidate selection and behavior. We unearth conceptual challenges of constructing a theory of sincere voting in PR elections. Using a rich but tractable framework, we propose a foundational theory of voting behavior in list PR systems. We show how voters’ expectations about the election outcome shape the relative salience of different candidates on a party’s ballot and ultimately determine their induced preferences over a party’s list. Our framework shows how voters allocate their attention across different ranks on a party’s ballot, and how this depends on each party’s relative popularity.

Strategic Voting Versus Sincere Voting

People do not always vote for the party that they like the most. Sometimes, they choose to vote for another one because they want to maximize their influence on the outcome of the election. This behavior driven by strategic considerations is often labeled as “strategic voting.” It is opposed to “sincere voting,” which refers to the act of voting for one’s favorite party. Strategic voting can take different forms. It can consist in deserting a small party for a bigger one that has more chances of forming the government, or to the contrary, deserting a big party for a smaller one in order to send a signal to the political class. More importantly the strategies employed by voters differ across electoral systems. The presence of frequent government coalitions in proportional representation systems gives different opportunities, or ways, for people to influence the electoral outcome with their vote. In total, the literature identifies four main forms of strategic voting. Some of them are specific to some electoral systems; others apply to all.

Slavery in the Constitution: Why the Lower South Occasionally Succeeded at the Constitutional Convention

The Lower South’s successes at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 contributed to a constitution that prohibited federal interference with the slave trade until 1808, guaranteed fugitive slaves would be returned to their masters, and prevented export tariffs. We explain why the Lower South occasionally succeeded on sectional issues at the convention using a multiple-dimensional model of sincere voting, estimated using a new dataset of delegate votes, multiple imputation, and optimal classification. We argue that mixing sectional issues with powers of the federal government made the Lower South more mainstream and helped it gain support from various Northern delegations. We test this relationship using regression analysis and apply it to two substantive issues where the Lower South succeeded. The result is a largely new account of how slavery became encoded in the Constitution.

From ballot-boxes to barracks: Votes, institutions, and post-election coups

The military often intervenes in politics shortly after elections. This might be because election results reveal information about the ease with which a coup can succeed. Would-be coup perpetrators use this information to infer whether the incumbent can be removed from office without provoking popular unrest. We argue that the informational content of elections depends on the electoral rules that translate votes into outcomes. In electoral systems that incentivize strategic voting, election returns are less informative about the distribution of political support than in electoral systems that incentivize sincere voting. An extensive battery of statistical tests shows that vote-shares of election winners do not predict coup attempts in plurality systems, which encourage strategic voting, but they do predict coup attempts in non-plurality electoral systems, which do not encourage strategic voting. Thus, incumbents who have performed well in elections face a lower risk of coup attempts, but only in institutional environments where voting results are highly informative about the distribution of political support. We apply this logic to illuminate the decisions of the military to intervene into politics during the famous failed 1936 coup in Spain and the successful 1973 coup in Chile.

Discussion and Deliberation

Virtually all of our knowledge is second-hand, learned from others. In ideal deliberative settings, such as Habermas’s ‘ideal speech situation’, learning from others works well because participants are challenged to provide evidence and be consistent in their arguments. Not all real-world deliberation lives up to such high standards, but even non-ideal deliberation can be epistemically advantageous. We investigate five ways how: by improving voter competence; by reducing positive correlation; by incentivizing more sincere voting; by making the decision problem more truth-conducive; and by changing the decision problem in epistemically beneficial ways. The chapter ends with the conjecture that the ‘Deliberation Effect’ will boost group competence at least a little.

A Unified Spatial Model of Congress

This chapter presents a unified model of legislative elections, parties, and roll call voting, built around a party leadership election. First, a legislative caucus selects a party leader who campaigns based on a platform of a disciplinary system. Once elected, that leader runs the legislative session, in which roll call votes occur. Then elections occur, and incumbents face re-election with the positions they incrementally adopted. When the caucus is ideologically homogeneous, electorally diverse, and policy motivated, members will elect a leader who solves the collective action problem of sincere voting with “preference-preserving influence.” That leader will threaten to punish legislators who bow to electoral pressure to vote as centrists. Consequently, legislators vote sincerely as extremists and get slightly lower vote shares, but they offset that lost utility with policy gains that they couldn’t have gotten without party influence. Party leaders will rarely pressure legislators to vote insincerely.

Extreme Reversion Points and Party Leadership from 2011 through 2016

When a majority party works on normal legislation, it faces a collective action problem of sincere voting, and must prevent legislators from centrist districts from voting against noncentrist legislation. From 2011 through 2016, though, Republican Party leadership faced a different challenge, and leaders were pitted against the extremists in their caucus. This occurred because of a change to the legislative agenda resulting from the combination of extreme polarization and divided government introduced by the 2010 election. With no incentive to work on normal legislation, the agenda did little but avoid reversion points, like debt ceiling breaches, which the extreme elements in the caucus actually found acceptable. Speaker Boehner was forced to solve a new collective action problem, then, convincing a group of Republicans to join with Democrats on bipartisan deals to avoid these reversion points. While historically unusual, the dynamic is what would be expected from the unified model.

Incremental Polarization

This book provides a unified spatial model of legislative elections, parties, and roll call voting to address three primary questions: why do legislators adopt extreme positions, how do they win given their extremism, and what role do parties play in promoting polarization? The book links spatial models of elections to spatial models of roll call voting in the legislature, and suggests that the key to understanding polarization is to reverse the order of conventional models and place the legislative session before the election because legislators adopt positions in the policy space, extreme or otherwise, through the incremental process of casting roll call votes. Linking a spatial model of an election to a model of roll call voting, the book derives the following. When a legislative caucus is ideologically homogeneous, electorally diverse, and policy motivated, it will empower party leaders to solve the collective action problem of sincere voting by counterbalancing members’ electoral pressure to vote as centrists. The result is that the caucus achieves policy goals at the cost of some electoral security, but agenda paradoxes minimize the electoral damage done, so most incumbents win re-election anyway at only slightly diminished margins. This model explains the development of polarization in the House of Representatives throughout the post–World War II period, and key votes on legislation such as the Affordable Care Act. Moreover, even the unusual politics within the Republican Party during the divided government period from 2011 through 2016 follow naturally from extensions of the model.

Polarization and Solving the Collective Action Problem

The unified model predicts that a legislative caucus that is ideologically homogeneous, electorally diverse and policy-motivated will empower party leaders to solve the collective action problem of sincere voting. The result will be that legislators incrementally adopt ideologically extreme, electorally suboptimal positions in the policy space. Over the course of the post-World War II period, the party caucuses became more ideologically homogeneous, but retained their electoral diversity, thereby creating the conditions for party government. Legislators from centrist, competitive districts closely tracked their party medians rather than adopting centrist positions, which would have satisfied their constituents. That suggests parties are solving the collective action problem of sincere voting. No other institution is comparably suited to creating that effect, and even the rise of competitive primaries serves as a poor explanation for the phenomenon.