Abstract
AbstractWhen including outside pressure on voters as individual costs, sequential voting (as in roll call votes) is theoretically preferable to simultaneous voting (as in recorded ballots). Under complete information, sequential voting has a unique subgame perfect equilibrium with a simple equilibrium strategy guaranteeing true majority results. Simultaneous voting suffers from a plethora of equilibria, often contradicting true majorities. Experimental results, however, show severe deviations from the equilibrium strategy in sequential voting with not significantly more true majority results than in simultaneous voting. Social considerations under sequential voting—based on emotional reactions toward the behaviors of the previous players—seem to distort subgame perfect equilibria.
Highlights
Decision making by voting come in various forms, where some procedural differences can have apparent consequences for the results of a vote: absolute versus relative majority, simple versus qualified majority, or weighted voting versus equal suffrage
Our voting games belong to a class of games called binary threshold public good (BTPG) games, where players have only two possible actions and where a “public good” is produced if and only if a certain threshold is passed, that means “enough” players decide for the proposal
The sequential voting behavior is rather different from the theoretical prediction and the comparison with simultaneous voting shows only small differences in true majority frequencies
Summary
Decision making by voting come in various forms, where some procedural differences can have apparent consequences for the results of a vote: absolute versus relative majority, simple versus qualified majority, or weighted voting versus equal suffrage. The coexistence of simultaneous and sequential voting leaves the question open if one of the two procedures has a theoretical or practical advantage This question of which of the two democratic mechanism is favorable need to be answered experimentally, as differences in voting mechanisms would not be a problem if all voters vote according to their “true preference.”. Ten of the suspended MPs had the whip restored with four that could run in the December 2019 election as Tory candidates (retaining their seats); all others who rebelled against their party lost their seats This is an extreme example of the outside pressure under which members of parliament and other voting bodies make their decisions. There have been empirical investigations of parliamentary decisions, for example of the roll call votes in the US Senate (Clinton et al 2004; Spenkuch et al 2018), but none directly compares sequential with simultaneous voting mechanisms..
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