Sequential Voting Research Articles

The Strategic Dis/advantage of Voting Early

Under sequential voting, voting late enables conditioning on which candidates are viable, while voting early can influence the field of candidates. But the latter effect can be harmful: shrinking the field increases not only the likelihood that future voters vote for one's favorite candidate, but also that they vote for an opponent. Specifically, if one's favorite candidate is significantly better than all others, then early voting is disadvantageous and all equilibria are equivalent to simultaneous voting. Conversely, when some other candidate is almost as good, then any Markov, symmetric, anonymous equilibrium involves sequential voting (and differs from simultaneous voting). (JEL D72)

Backward Induction in the Wild? Evidence from Sequential Voting in the US Senate

In the US Senate, roll calls are held in alphabetical order. We document that senators early in the order are less likely to vote with the majority of their own party than those whose last name places them at the end of the alphabet. To speak to the mechanism behind this result, we develop a simple model of sequential voting, in which forward-looking senators rely on backward induction in order to free ride on their colleagues. Estimating our model structurally, we find that this form of strategic behavior is an important part of equilibrium play. We also consider, but ultimately dismiss, alternative explanations related to learning about common values and vote buying. (JEL D72, D82, D83)

Backward Induction in the Wild: Evidence from the U.S. Senate

Backward induction is a cornerstone of modern game theory. Yet, laboratory exper- iments consistently show that subjects fail to properly backward induct. Whether thesendings generalize to other, real-world settings remains an open question. This paper develops a simple model of sequential voting in the U.S. Senate that allows for a straightforward test of the null hypothesis of myopic play. Exploiting quasi-random variation in the alphabetical composition of the Senate and, there- fore, the order in which Senators get to cast their votes, the evidence suggests that agents do rely on backward reasoning. At the same time, Senators' backward in- duction prowess appears to be quite limited. In particular, there is no evidence of Senators reasoning backwards on therst several hundred roll call votes in which they participate.

Sequential Voting and Agenda Manipulation

We study the possibilities for agenda manipulation under strategic voting for two prominent sequential voting procedures, the amendment and the successive procedure. We show that a well-known result for tournaments, namely that the successive procedure is (weakly) more manipulable than the amendment procedure at any given preference prole, extends to arbitrary majority quotas. Moreover, our characterizations of the attainable outcomes for arbitrary quotas allow us to compare the possibilities for manipulation across dierent quotas. It turns out that the simple majority quota maximizes the domain of preference proles for which neither procedure is manipulable, but at the same time neither the simple majority quota nor any other quota uniformly minimize the scope of manipulation, once this becomes possible. Hence, quite surprisingly, simple majority voting is not necessarily the optimal choice of a society that is concerned about agenda manipulation.

Voting Islamist or voting secular? An empirical analysis of voting outcomes in Egypt’s “Arab Spring”

This paper studies empirically the voting outcomes of Egypt’s first parliamentary elections after the Arab Spring. In light of the strong Islamist success at the polls, we explore the main determinants of Islamist versus secular voting. We identify two dimensions that affect voting outcomes at the constituency level: socioeconomic profile and the electoral institutional framework. Our results show that education is negatively associated with Islamist voting. Interestingly, we find significant evidence suggesting that higher poverty levels are associated with a lower vote share for Islamist parties. Exploiting the sequential voting setup, we show that later voting stages have not resulted in stronger support for the already winning Islamist parties (i.e., there is no bandwagon effect).

Pivotality and Responsibility Attribution in Sequential Voting

This paper analyzes responsibility attributions for outcomes of collective decision making processes. In particular, we ask if decision makers are blamed for being pivotal if they implement an unpopular outcome in a sequential voting process. We conduct an experimental voting game in which decision makers vote about the allocation of money between themselves and recipients without voting rights. We measure responsibility attributions for voting decisions by eliciting the monetary punishment that recipients assign to individual decision makers. We find that pivotal decision makers are punished significantly more for an unpopular voting outcome than non-pivotal decision makers. Our data also suggest that some voters avoid being pivotal by voting strategically in order to delegate the pivotal vote to subsequent decision makers.

Distributive Politics in Public Goods Network: Implicit Logrolling by Agenda Setting

Public goods networks arouse conflict between those who already benefit from the project and those who merely pay its costs. Thus, it may seem that it is difficult for pork-barrel politicians to target these public goods for logrolling with other districts. The purpose of this paper is to show that logrolling is still possible for such pork-barrel politicians by proper agenda setting. In order to demonstrate this, I model the centralized decision-making process as a sequential vote among representatives from the districts. I assume that the districts are better off if and only if the public good connects them to the network. I find that the universal provision of public goods is enabled by proper agenda setting, even in cases where their costs exceed the benefits. This implies that public goods can be under or overprovided, and hence, the centralized decision-making process fails to internalize externalities.

Does Seating Location Impact Voting Behavior on Food and Drug Administration Advisory Committees?

Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advisory committees have a significant influence on patterns of clinical practice worldwide. Recent guidance to the committees by the FDA has focused on attempting to eliminate sources of bias due to committee voting procedures. Nevertheless, major sources of social influence have not been addressed. We analyzed transcripts of Circulatory Systems Devices Panel meetings from 1997 to 2005 in which the panel cast votes on premarket approval and for which a voting minority existed. Committee members who are assigned to speak later are significantly more likely to be in the voting minority (P < 0.001). This effect holds for meetings with sequential voting (P = 0.0058) and for meetings with simultaneous voting (P = 0.045). A weaker effect shows that, for meetings with sequential voting, committee members who vote later are significantly more likely to be in the voting minority (P = 0.018). Speaking order and voting order are both determined by seating location. We therefore conclude that voting behavior on FDA expert advisory committees is strongly associated with seating location. This suggests the presence of a possible social dynamic that is not addressed by existing FDA committee procedures.

Voting Islamist or Voting Secular? An Empirical Analysis of Voting Outcomes in 'Arab Spring' Egypt

This paper empirically studies the voting outcomes of Egypt’s first parliamentary elections after the Arab Spring. In light of the strong Islamist success in the polls, we explore the main determinants of Islamist vs. secular voting. We identify three dimensions that affect voting outcomes at the constituency level: the socio-economic profile, the economic structure and the electoral institutional framework. Our results show that education is negatively associated with Islamist voting. Interestingly, we find significant evidence which suggests that higher poverty levels are associated with a lower vote share for Islamist parties. Later voting stages in the sequential voting setup do not exhibit a bandwagon effect.

Controlling the order of moves in voting by veto. I. Conditions for making the given decision

Collective decision making in complex systems using voting by veto is considered. A dedicated player is assumed to exist in the collective and be able to set sequential voting (the order of moves) for the players. The problem of searching for the control strategy for the order of moves so that to ensure the choice of the alternative of the dedicated player is stated. The game-theory formalization of the problem with the first player as the leader is proposed. Sufficient conditions are obtained for players' preferences for the game to have the required order of moves. These conditions show that the voting procedure involved does not result in the worst decision made for any player or the decision chosen out of the last preferences of the group of participants. The explicit form is found for control strategies for the order of moves for the cases of the sufficient conditions met when the partners of the first player have his alternative at the end of their preference list-it is no higher than the third preference from the end for everybody and may be one place higher for one player. We proved that when controlling the order of moves, the move of the first player is sufficient to be left first and that the order of moves can be formed beforehand, prior to voting.

Sequential voting in large elections with multiple candidates

I analyze strategic voting incentives in large elections with three candidates when voting takes place sequentially. Voters have perfect information about their private preferences but do not know the distribution from which other voters' preferences are drawn. If a candidate finishes last in an early voting round, voters deduce that this candidate is likely to be less popular amongst the remaining voters, and the remaining voters almost always have an incentive to stop voting for this candidate. By contrast, sincere voting equilibria can exist under either simultaneous voting or an early voting round of sequential voting without knife-edge assumptions.

Identity, reputation and social interaction with an application to sequential voting

We analyze binary choices in a random utility model assuming that agent’s preferences are affected by conformism (with respect to the behavior of the society) and coherence (with respect to identity). We show that multiple stationary equilibria may arise and that the outcome looks very different from a society where all the agents take their decisions in isolation. We quantify the fraction of agents that behave coherently. We apply the analysis to sequential voting when voters “like to win”. Compared to the present literature, we enrich the setting assuming that each voter is endowed with an ideology and we consider the interplay between coherence and the desire to vote with the (perceived) majority.

SEQUENTIAL VOTING WHEN LONG ELECTIONS ARE COSTLY

This paper analyzes sequential voting in binary elections when voters are motivated by a desire both to elect their preferred candidate and to avoid a long and costly election. I find a unique equilibrium in which a voter's action depends both on the intensity of the voter's preferences as well as how well the candidates have done in earlier voting rounds. This equilibrium results in momentum in which voters are more likely to vote for the candidate currently in the lead. Furthermore, the probability a voter votes for a candidate is increasing in the size of the candidate's lead. As a consequence, a candidate is more likely to win the election if the candidate's stronger supporters vote earlier in the election.

Voting in Corporate Boards with Heterogeneous Preferences

We analyze the voting behavior of a board of directors that has to approve (or reject) an investment proposal with uncertain return. We consider three types of directors: insiders, who are biased toward acceptance of the project, independent outsiders who want to maximize the firm's profit and independent outsiders who care about their reputation. We show that the presence of members with heterogeneous preferences can be beneficial and that the partisan behavior of insiders can be used as a sort of coordinating device by uninformed outsiders. Provided that the size of the board is optimal, there is no gain from increasing the number of outsiders above the strict majority despite the fact that each outsider is informed with positive probability. Substituting profit-maximizing directors with directors concerned about their reputation is not an obstacle to profit maximization provided that an appropriate sequential voting protocol is followed. We also show that a proper board composition makes communication between directors irrelevant in the sense that the same outcome is obtained with and without communication. Finally, as information is costly, our model provides some suggestions on the optimal size of boards.

Voting on Labor-Market Integration and Education Policy When Citizens Differ in Mobility and Ability

We analyze how institutional and political decisions are intertwined. Citizens who differ in their mobility and ability vote first on labor market integration and afterwards on education policy. the institutional decision on integration influences the succeeding education policy. More surprisingly, the prospect of voting on education policy also affects the preceding integration decision. There are incentives for citizens to vote strategically for the institutional setting in which their preferred education policy is more successful at the polls. We show how a ‘joint’ analysis of the institutional and political decision alters the results compared to an ‘isolated’ analysis of either of the two decisions. Also, we explore how the two-dimensional heterogeneity of the citizens shapes the voting equilibrium in our setting with sequential voting.

Sequential composition of voting rules in multi-issue domains

In many real-world group decision making problems, the set of alternatives is a Cartesian product of finite value domains for each of a given set of variables (or issues). Dealing with such domains leads to the following well-known dilemma: either ask the voters to vote separately on each issue, which may lead to the so-called multiple election paradoxes as soon as voters’ preferences are not separable; or allow voters to express their full preferences on the set of all combinations of values, which is practically impossible as soon as the number of issues and/or the size of the domains are more than a few units. We try to reconciliate both views and find a middle way, by relaxing the extremely demanding separability restriction into this much more reasonable one: there exists a linear order x 1 > ⋯ > x p on the set of issues such that for each voter, every issue x i is preferentially independent of x i + 1 , … , x p given x 1 , … , x i − 1 . This leads us to define a family of sequential voting rules, defined as the sequential composition of local voting rules. These rules relate to the setting of conditional preference networks (CP-nets) recently developed in the Artificial Intelligence literature. Lastly, we study in detail how these sequential rules inherit, or do not inherit, the properties of their local components.

Voting on Labour-Market Integration and Education Policy When Citizens Differ in Mobility and Ability

We analyse how institutional and political decisions are intertwined. Citizens who differ in their mobility and ability vote first on labour market integration and afterwards on education policy. The institutional decision on integration influences the succeeding education policy. More surprisingly, the prospect of voting on education policy also affects the preceding integration decision. There are incentives for citizens to vote strategically for the institutional setting in which their preferred education policy is more successful at the polls. We show how a ‘joint’ analysis of the institutional and political decision alters the results compared to an ‘isolated’ analysis of either of the two decisions. Also, we explore how the two-dimensional heterogeneity of the citizens shapes the voting equilibrium in our setting with sequential voting.

Committees, sequential voting and transparency

We propose a model of sequential voting in committees, where members use their individual votes to signal high efficiency in their bid to become re-appointed. Transparency precludes efficient information aggregation, and thus decreases the utility of the principal in the first period; it may be beneficial to her in the second period. Under transparency, equilibria under sequential voting always differ from those under simultaneous voting and may lead to more or less efficient information aggregation.

Forecasting the presidential primary vote: Viability, ideology and momentum

The presidential primary vote represents a unique electoral forecasting challenge, with multiple candidates and sequential voting. This study compares the leading primary vote forecast models by re-estimating them for a common set of candidates and nomination campaigns. A new forecast model is estimated to assess the predictive power of candidate ideology, controlling for the effects of variables found to be significant in prior studies. Finally, the study compares the early forecasts, based on data from before the Iowa caucus, with “momentum” models, which are the early models, updated with variables representing the results of the Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire Primary vote, predicting the remaining contested primary vote.

Momentum and Social Learning in Presidential Primaries

This paper investigates social learning in sequential voting systems. In the econometric model, candidates experience momentum effects when their performance in early states exceeds expectations. The empirical application uses daily polling data from the 2004 presidential primary. We find that Kerry benefited from surprising wins in early states and took votes away from Dean. Owing to these momentum effects, early voters had up to five times the influence of late voters in the selection of candidates, and this helps to explain the distribution of advertising expenditures. Finally, we use the estimated model to conduct two counterfactual experiments.