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We show that Approval voting need not trigger sincere behavior in equilibrium of Poisson voting games and hence might lead a strategic voter to skip a candidate preferred to his worst preferred approved candidate. We identify two main rationales for these violations of sincerity. First, if a candidate has no votes, a voter might skip him. Notwithstanding, we provide sufficient conditions on the voters' preference intensities to remove this sort of insincerity. On the contrary, if the candidate gets a positive share of the votes, a voter might skip him solely on the basis of his ordinal preferences. This second type of insincerity is a consequence of the correlation of the candidates' scores. The incentives for sincerity of rank scoring rules are also discussed.

A major challenge in instrumental variable (IV) analysis is to find instruments that are valid, or have no direct effect on the outcome and are ignorable. Typically one is unsure whether all of the putative IVs are in fact valid. We propose a general inference procedure in the presence of invalid IVs, called two-stage hard thresholding with voting. The procedure uses two hard thresholding steps to select strong instruments and to generate candidate sets of valid IVs. Voting takes the candidate sets and uses majority and plurality rules to determine the true set of valid IVs. In low dimensions with invalid instruments, our proposal correctly selects valid IVs, consistently estimates the causal effect, produces valid confidence intervals for the causal effect and has oracle optimal width, even if the so-called 50% rule or the majority rule is violated. In high dimensions, we establish nearly identical results without oracle optimality. In simulations, our proposal outperforms traditional and recent methods in the invalid IV literature. We also apply our method to reanalyse the causal effect of education on earnings.

In market based societies consumers are able to express the intensity of their preference for an object by paying more for it. However, under some voting systems, consumers are unable to express the intensity of their preference for a candidate due to the constraint of the \"one person, one vote\" principle. Cumulative voting maintains the equality of the \"one person, one vote\" principle by allotting each voter the same number of votes, while also allowing for expression of intensity of candidate preference. This paper provides an experimental analysis of voter behavior under different voting systems.

Using a large sample of director elections, we document that shareholder votes are significantly related to firm performance, governance, director performance, and voting mechanisms. However, most variables, except meeting attendance and ISS recommendations, have little economic impact on shareholder votes—even poorly performing directors and firms typically receive over 90% of votes cast. Nevertheless, fewer votes lead to lower \"abnormal\" CEO compensation and a higher probability of removing poison pills, classified boards, and CEOs. Meanwhile, director votes have little impact on election outcomes, firm performance, or director reputation. These results provide important benchmarks for the current debate on election reforms.

We estimate a model of strategic voting and quantify the impact it has on election outcomes. Because the model exhibits multiplicity of outcomes, we adopt a set estimator. Using Japanese general-election data, we find a large fraction (63.4 percent, 84.9 percent) of strategic voters, only a small fraction (1.4 percent, 4.2 percent) of whom voted for a candidate other than the one they most preferred (misaligned voting). Existing empirical literature has not distinguished between the two, estimating misaligned voting instead of strategic voting. Accordingly, while our estimate of strategic voting is high, our estimate of misaligned voting is comparable to previous studies.

Despite common perception, existing theoretical literature lacks a complete formal argument regarding the relationship between the electoral rule disproportionality and platform polarization. In this article, we build a model that incorporates the disproportionality of the electoral system in a standard Downsian electoral competition setup with mainly, but not necessarily purely, policy-motivated parties. We first show that in equilibrium, platform polarization is decreasing in the level of the electoral rule disproportionality. We then argue that the number of parties has a positive effect on platform polarization when polarization is measured by the distance between the two most distant platforms. This effect does not hold when polarization is measured by the widely used Dalton index. Constructing a data set covering more than 300 elections, our main theoretical findings are empirically supported, pointing toward the electoral rule disproportionality as a major determinant of polarization.

In a Borda count, BC, M. de Borda suggested the last preference cast should receive 1 point, the voter's penultimate ranking should get 2 points, and so on. Today, however, points are often awarded to (first, second,..., last) preferences cast as per(n,n−1, ..., 1) or more frequently, (n−1, n−2,..., 0). If partial voting¹ is allowed, and if a first preference is to be given n or n − 1 points regardless of how many preferences the voter casts, he/she will be incentivised to rank only one option/candidate. If everyone acts in this way, the BC metamorphoses into a plurality vote... which de Borda criticized at length. If all the voters submit full ballots, the outcome—social choice or ranking—will be the same under any of the above three counting procedures. In the event of one or more persons submitting a partial vote, however, outcomes may vary considerably. This preliminary paper suggests research should consider partial voting. The author examines the consequences of the various rules so far advocated and then purports that M. de Borda, in using his formula, was perhaps more astute than the science has hitherto recognised.

Although the literature examining the relationship between ideological congruence and electoral rules is quite large, relatively little attention has been paid to how congruence should be conceptualized. As we demonstrate, empirical results regarding ideological congruence can depend on exactly how scholars conceptualize and measure it. In addition to clarifying various aspects of how scholars currently conceptualize congruence, we introduce a new conceptualization and measure of congruence that captures a long tradition in democratic theory emphasizing the ideal of having a legislature that accurately reflects the preferences of the citizenry as a whole. Our new measure is the direct counterpart for congruence of the vote-seat disproportionality measures so heavily used in comparative studies of representation. Using particularly appropriate data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems, we find that governments in proportional democracies are not substantively more congruent than those in majoritarian democracies. Proportional democracies are, however, characterized by more representative legislatures.

This paper analyzes the properties of runoff electoral systems when voters are strategic. A model of three-candidate runoff elections is presented, and two new features are included: the risk of upset victory in the second round is endogenous, and many types of runoff systems are considered. Three main results emerge. First, runoff elections produce equilibria in which only two candidates receive a positive fraction of the votes. Second, a sincere voting equilibrium does not always exist. Finally, runoff systems with a threshold below 50 percent produce an Ortega effect that may lead to the systematic victory of the Condorcet loser.

This note supplements the recent work of McCune and Wilson (Public Choice 196(1–2):19–50, 2023) by providing a complete analysis of spoiler effects under both plurality voting and Ranked-Choice Voting in the case of three (potential) candidates. The trick for definitively identifying all spoiler possibilities under both voting rules in the three-candidate case is to partition the set of all three-candidate preference profiles into eight types by cross-classifying the candidates in terms of their plurality status and Condorcet relationships. The resulting typology allows us to identify the winners in all possible two-candidate and three-candidate elections under both voting rules and therefore suffices to identify all spoiler effects. It implies, among other things, that the set of profiles that are vulnerable to spoilers under Ranked-Choice Voting is a proper subset of those vulnerable to spoilers under plurality rule.