Electoral College System Research Articles

Battlegrounds and Budgets

Based on prior research on political business cycles, we investigate the manipulation of state budgets in battleground states. The state-based winner-take-all Electoral College system in the United States makes certain states extremely politicized during presidential elections. We hypothesize that budgets will target specific groups of swing voters in these battleground states. We test the impact of competitive state status in presidential elections on state budgets from 1982 to 2005 by creating a cross-sectional time-series regression model of state budget priorities from Jacoby and Schneider. While controlling for known determinants of budgets, we find strong support for our hypothesis.

Education Reform and the Political Safeguards of Federalism

The passage of the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) in 2001 sparked widespread controversy over the federal government’s proper role in public education. Opponents criticized the legislation as an unprecedented federal intrusion on state and local governments’ policymaking authority. Whereas previous incarnations of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) required local schools and districts to comply with detailed rules about how to spend categorical funds, federal moneys were never before made contingent on a rigorous testing and accountability regime. By requiring annual testing and tying federal funding to student outcomes, the new legislation signaled a shift in the federal government’s role vis a vis subnational governing bodies. This shift in authority led some to question whether state and local governments’ structural protections from federal overreaching are dead — at least in the field of public education. In The Political Safeguards of Federalism, Herbert Wechsler argued that because states’ rights are preserved through the legislative process, the Supreme Court need not intervene to protect states from federal regulatory intervention. The legislative process shelters state autonomy, Wechsler argued, by ensuring that federal legislation must gain the approval of the Senate, which is responsive to state interests, the House, whose congressional districts are dictated by state legislatures, and the President, who depends on states through the electoral college system. According to critics, congressional acquiescence in President George W. Bush’s drive for top-down standards-based reform (SBR) demonstrates the failure of these traditional safeguards. Beginning in the 1990s the Supreme Court stopped deferring to federal regulatory authority and began striking down legislation it deemed overly intrusive. According to the Court, national political institutions had failed to protect state interests, thus necessitating a more robust role for the judiciary in preserving the delicate balance between state and federal interests. Because federal legislators are under pressure to solve pressing national problems but are not responsible for implementation, they will inevitably pass the buck to state representatives by voting for coercive, unfunded mandates. Bipartisan support for NCLB, which brought together the likes of Representative Tom DeLay, a fierce opponent of federal intervention who once sought to eliminate the Department of Education, and liberal Democrats such as Senator Edward Kennedy, lends support to the Supreme Court’s more aggressive stance. It could be argued that federal representatives arrived at a legislative compromise without seriously considering NCLB’s impact on a broad spectrum of state and local constituents. In response to mounting criticism of Wechsler’s theory, Dean Larry Kramer has developed an alternative version of the political safeguards framework. He posits that the political party system itself protects states from federal intrusion because each party has representatives operating at multiple layers of government, all of whom are mutually dependent. According to this theory, representatives at the national level must respond to local and state concerns in exchange for political support, thus producing a natural check on federal encroachment. Dean Kramer further characterizes the proliferation of bureaucratic agencies beginning with the New Deal as an additional political safeguard of federalism. Like national political parties, regulatory agencies link federal, state, and local administrators together because the federal government relies on administrators at lower levels of government to implement policy. Dean Kramer’s revived political safeguards theory has interesting implications for the education field because of the unique role that politics and bureaucracy have played in the promulgation and implementation of federal education legislation. In this paper, I will apply Kramer’s political safeguards thesis to four educational reform movements: a New Deal Youth Program, administrative progressivism, the ESEA, and the modern standards-based reform (SBR) movement culminating in NCLB. Specifically, I will draw on educational reforms of these four periods to explore the extent to which bureaucracy and the party system can successfully mediate disputes over the division of power between local, state, and federal government. I will begin by comparing the role of bureaucracy in furthering or frustrating federalist aims in education governance under President Roosevelt’s New Deal and President Johnson’s Great Society. Then, I will consider the role of party politics in federal education reform, from progressives’ attempt to depoliticize the field to the political consensus embodied in NCLB.

Proportional versus winner-take-all electoral vote allocations

This paper considers how the welfare of voters is affected under an Electoral College system when some state elects to award electoral votes in proportion to the number of votes received by each candidate rather than awarding all electoral votes to the winner of the state. I show that a majority of voters in that state is made worse off as a result of the change. I also give conditions under which voters in other states are made better or worse off as a result of the change.

Origens do bipartidarismo: uma tentativa de entender as eleições norte-americanas

A eleição nos Estados Unidos intriga os brasileiros. Poucos conseguem entendê-las: nem mesmo os americanos sabem exatamente como funciona sua democracia. Não escolhem o presidente pelo voto direto, como aqui. Delegam o poder de escolha a um Colégio Eleitoral composto por representante dos dois únicos partidos que conseguem realmente participar do processo.

How the Electoral College Influences Campaigns and Policy: The Probability of Being Florida

This paper analyzes how US presidential candidates should allocate resources across states to maximize the probability of winning the election, by developing and estimating a probabilistic-voting model of political competition under the Electoral College system. Actual campaigns act in close agreement with the model. There is a 0.9 correlation between equilibrium and actual presidential campaign visits across states, both in 2000 and 2004. The paper shows how presidential candidate attention is affected by the states' number of electoral votes, forecasted state-election outcomes, and forecast uncertainty. It also analyzes the effects of a direct national popular vote for president. (JEL D72)

Count Every Vote - All 538 of Them

This article strikes a blow in defense of America's much-maligned system of choosing a president: the Electoral College. It argues that, although imperfect, the Electoral College is superior to the alternatives and should be retained because it does an excellent job of balancing the two central purposes of presidential elections: choosing the right winner, and doing so in a reasonably timely and undisputed fashion. Whereas most literature defending the Electoral College focuses primarily on federalism, this article details the pragmatic and procedural case for maintaining the status quo. Simply put, a direct national election would be a nightmare in a close race. Recounts and legal challenges would stretch from sea to shining sea, and with two centuries of legal precedent tossed aside, courts would have a very difficult time managing it all. Without the multiple layers of unappreciated procedural safeguards provided by the current system, post-election uncertainty could stretch well into January, raising doubt about whether we would have a clear winner by inauguration day. No election system can be perfect, because an election is a measurement of the popular will, and all measurements have margins of error. The current system, however, has served us well for more than two centuries. It gets the result right, at least arguably, almost every time - and it gives us a definitive result every single time, as any presidential election system must. It always gives us a president. And in a very close election, an arguably wrong president is better than no president at all. The article's introduction discusses a hypothetical 2012 election between President Barack Obama and Governor Jeb Bush. In this scenario, the interstate compact system, a proposal currently under consideration in various states, has come into effect. This means the Electoral College still exists, but now purports to represent the nationwide popular vote. The scenario briefly outlines some of the dire results this change could have in a very close election. The remainder of the article is split into five parts. Part I argues that, as mentioned above, presidential elections have two main purposes: choosing the right winner, and doing so in a reasonably timely and undisputed fashion. Parts II, III and IV analyze how well these purposes are served by three different possible election systems: the current Electoral College system, a true direct popular-vote election, and the hybrid interstate-compact proposal. The article contends that the current system is, on balance, superior to either alternative; it more reliably fulfills both purposes than would either proposed reform. However, acknowledging the possibility that this balance could someday shift, Part V suggests a set of minimum requirements that would be absolutely necessary for a functional popular-vote system, should it ever become necessary to abandon the Electoral College.

The Electoral College System, Political Party Dominance, and Voter Turnout, With Evidence from the 2004 Presidential Election

Within the context of a broadened version of the “rational voter model,” this study empirically investigates a hypothesis that asserts that within the context of the Electoral College System, the greater the degree to which either the Republican Party or the Democratic Party dominates the other in any given state, the lower the aggregate voter participation rate in that state. Using the 2004 Presidential election as the study period, the analysis includes a number of economic and demographic variables. Using a different methodology than previous studies of voter turnout and the Electoral College System, as well as more current data, this study finds strong empirical evidence for the hypothesis. It also is suggested that, logically, the Electoral College System distorts the pattern of voter turnout across states.

Reliability of Information Aggregation with Regional Biases: A Note

Is there a rationale for an electoral college system or do these voting systems always waste useful information? This paper studies this question in a setup in which voting is supposed to aggregate decentralized information about individual preferences for two candidates. Individual perceptions may be affected by regional information. When such regional information plays a major role, an electoral college system may be superior to simple majority voting.

Do increases in petroleum product prices put the incumbent party at risk in US presidential elections?

This article investigates the impact of petroleum product prices on recent United States’ presidential elections by modelling the probability of the incumbent presidential party losing a state (under the United States’ electoral college system) it had carried the previous presidential election. The main finding is that the probability of the incumbent party losing a state previously carried increases with petroleum product prices but only in those states that have primarily energy consuming economies. We also find that increases in the number of international conflicts, increases in real state per-capita income growth, and increases in state per capita grants-in-aid all reduce the likelihood of losing previously carried states while higher taxation growth increases this likelihood.

The electoral college: diversification and the election process

The basic financial principle of diversification is applied to the U.S. Presidential election process. Applying this principle shows that the current Electoral College system may offer significant advantages over a direct voting system. Calls for an abolishment of the Electoral College may be premature if the goal of the election process is to ensure accurate results.

Vote trading in public elections

During the 2000 U.S. Presidential race, an apparently new idea, called vote trading, was introduced to help one of the two major-party candidates (Gore) win. The idea was, through an Internet mechanism, to induce voters who supported a minor-party candidate (Nader) to vote for Gore in states where this would help Gore and to induce an equal number of voters who supported Gore to vote for Nader in states where this would not hurt Gore. Thus Nader would receive the same number of popular votes as he would have received without the trading (providing an incentive for Nader voters to participate). Vote trading was implemented at a number of Web sites in 2000 (and again in 2004); it illustrates how information technology can be used to exploit the electoral college system; and it has the potential to alter the outcome of Presidential elections. In this paper, we formalize this idea, present several variations, and present an optimal way for Web sites to implement it (so as to best help the major-party candidate get elected) in both deterministic and stochastic settings.

How democratic is the American Constitution?

In this provocative work, an American political scientist poses the question, Why should we uphold our constitution?. The vast majority of Americans venerate the American Constitution and the principles it embodies, but many also worry that the United States has fallen behind other nations on crucial democratic issues, including economic equality, racial integration and women's rights. Robert Dahl explores the vital tension between the Americans' belief in the legitimacy of their constitution and their belief in the principles of democracy. Dahl starts with the assumption that the legitimacy of the American Constitution derives solely from its utility as an instrument of democratic governance. Dahl demonstrates that, due to the context in which it was conceived, the constitution came to incorporate significant antidemocratic elements. Because the Framers of the Constitution had no relevant example of a democratic political system on which to model the American government, many defining aspects of the political system were implemented as a result of short-sightedness or last-minute compromise. Dahl highlights those elements of the American system that are most unusual and potentially antidemocratic: the federal system, the bicameral legislature, judicial review, presidentialism, and the electoral college system. The political system that emerged from the world's first great democratic experiment is unique - no other well-established democracy has copied it. How does the American constitutional system function in comparison to other democratic systems? How could the political system be altered to achieve more democratic ends? To what extent did the Framers of the Constitution build features into the political system that militate against significant democratic reform? Refusing to accept the status of the American Constitution as a sacred text, Dahl challenges America to think critically about the origins of its political system and to consider the opportunities for creating a more democratic society.

The 2000 American Presidential Election

The 2000 Presidential election was one of the longest, most expensive and closest in American history. It was the Presidential election that exposed the flaws (or genius) of the electoral college system, demonstrated the imperfections of media dependency on exit polls and quick election calling, and showed how a third party candidate with just two percent of the popular vote could make the difference in the crucial state of Florida. Democrats lost states they should have won; Republicans lost every big city and most of their suburbs; and the Florida election came down to a five-to-four muddled decision by the Supreme Court. Americans collectively learned a great civics lesson: that even in a bitter, controversial contest, our candidates accept defeat graciously; the simple act of voting is not so simple; and that for all its shortcomings, the electoral college did work.

The Electoral College and the election of 2000

Abstract The United States is one of few contemporary democracies that does not choose its chief executive officer through direct popular vote. Rather, the President of the United States is formally chosen by the Electoral College, and a majority of votes in the Electoral College is required to secure election to the Presidency. In 2000, Republican George W. Bush won a 271–266 majority in the Electoral College despite the fact that his opponent, Al Gore, won about half a million more popular votes. The Electoral College system can be conceptualized as a mechanism by which the results of separate elections in each state and, since 1964, the District of Columbia, can be aggregated to produce a nationwide outcome. It has not experienced major reform since 1804, despite the fact that many critics have regarded the system as archaic, outmoded, and essentially undemocratic. Since the early nineteenth century, more than 600 proposed constitutional amendments concerning the Electoral College system have been proposed and debated in Congress. Some would eliminate the Electoral College system altogether and replace it with direct popular vote. Others would retain the Electoral College system but change the way electors are selected or affect the relationships between popular and electoral votes in each state. Because the popular vote in Florida was very close, and because the remaining states were so closely divided, Florida proved to be the pivotal state in the 2000 presidential election. The closeness and controversy surrounding the Florida outcome has renewed efforts on the part of critics to eliminate or reform the system. However, analysis of the 2000 campaign underscores the fact that both sides based decisions concerning their campaign strategies and allocations of human financial resources in an effort to win an electoral college majority, within the constraints of the present system. It is unlikely that there will be sufficient support to overturn or reform the system through constitutional agreement in the foreseeable future.

Random thoughts on voting

Most Europeans have heard a good deal of criticism of the last U.S. presidential election. There are two normal criticisms, one of which regards the electoral college system, which means that the person who gets the majority of the popular votes does not necessarily win. The other criticism regards a set of specific criticisms of this election.

The Provision of Public Goods Under Alternative Electoral Incentives

Politicians who care about the spoils of office may underprovide a public good because its benefits cannot be targeted to voters as easily as pork-barrel spending. We compare a winner-take-all system—where all the spoils go to the winner—to a proportional system—where the spoils of office are split among candidates proportionally to their share of the vote. In a winner-take-all system the public good is provided less often than in a proportional system when the public good is particularly desirable. We then consider the electoral college system and show that it is particularly subject to this inefficiency. (JEL D82, L15)

The Electoral Lock Thesis: The Weighting Bias Component

In the September 1996 issue of PS, I.M. Destler analyzes the supposed “electoral lock” that Republicans have on the Presidency due to the dynamics of the Electoral College. Under Destler's analysis, there turns out to be no great advantage in the system for either party. Destler speculates that the reason is that there are offsetting effects. On the one hand, Republicans do well in smaller states which because of the weighting bias of the electoral college system are disproportionately represented (each state, of course, has one vote for each U.S. Representative and one vote for each Senator, the latter element giving a disproportionate voice to the smaller states). Democrats, on the other hand, have been doing better in the bigger states where the winner-take-all principle helps boost their electoral college totals.The electoral college is of course a perennial target of reformers who see it as unfair and confusing. While defenders of the electoral college argue its merits on many grounds, there are many significant problems, and few are as serious as the small state bias. Figure 1 shows this bias by comparing the actual votes that each state gets during elections in the 1990s (and 2000) with the votes each would get if the 538 electoral votes were allocated on a strictly proportional basis (the states are sorted by their non-biased electoral votes). Certainly, giving extra weight to one state over another—violating the one person-one vote principle—is more problematic than the second issue raised by Destler: the winner-take-all aspect.

A mathematical one-man one-vote rationale for Madisonian presidential voting based on maximum individual voting power

The One-man One-vote (OMOV) criterion is defined formally to demand (1) Maximum and equal voting power over the final outcome for each individual voter, and (2) Equal power-pervote for all groups of voters. We show that if it allotted Representative votes on a popular-vote-cast (rather than on the present census) basis, the Madisonian Electoral College system would assure individual voters the largest possible total power available to a “simple” system. This popular-vote basis (“MVP”) modification would relieve the present electoral impotence of voters in poorly-contested states without disturbing the voting power now enjoyed in closely-contested states.

The Electoral College and voter participation rates: Reply

This theoretical note argues that although both gross costs and possible gross benefits from the Electoral College can be identified, they cannot be compared in such a way as to generate a case that the Electoral College yields net benefits to society. In other words, the Electoral College system, pure and simple, artificially distorts behavior in a market where household preferences are to intended be expressed; although this distortion yields apparent benefits and costs, the existence of net benefits is not established. In sum, since the Electoral College system artificially distorts geographic voter participation rate patterns, the case needs to be made w y the system should be retained.

The Banzhaf Index for Multicandidate Presidential Elections

John Banzhaf III [Villanova Law Rev., 13 (1968), pp. 304–332] introduced a measure of voting power for a two-candidate United States presidential election conducted under an electoral college system. This measure indicated that an individual voter in a large state has more voting power than an individual in a small state. In this paper we generalize the Banzhaf index of voting power to voting situations in which there are more than two candidates with one to be elected. We then measure the voting power of an individual voter in a three-candidate and in a four-candidate presidential election under an electoral college system. It is found that there is slightly more bias in favor of an individual in a large state. In the last section, we conjecture what the results will be for an r-candidate United States presidential election.