Voting Outcomes Research Articles

Why voluntary municipal merger projects fail: evidence from popular votes in Switzerland

ABSTRACTWhat determines the failure of local government amalgamation referenda? Existing research suggests that functional pressures act as a push factor towards local territorial reform, whereas considerations of political self-determination exert a pull effect. However, we know little about the respective importance of these countervailing forces. In this paper, I analyze popular vote decisions on mergers of 541 municipalities involved in 166 different merger projects in three Swiss cantons since the new millennium. The results show that both functional pressures and concerns for self-determination are linked to popular vote outcomes: small municipalities are less likely to reject a merger. Concerns for self-determination matter, but only when the pressures of smallness are not overwhelming: a higher vote share of right-wing parties and a preponderance of other municipalities in the merger coalition increase the probability that voters reject a merger project. This has implications for policy-makers’ strategies when drafting and promoting voluntary local amalgamation reforms.

Inferring true voting outcomes in homophilic social networks

Consider a soccer game with spectators in a stadium acting as voters. The spectators are polled to determine whether a ball has crossed a line. Either the ball has crossed, or it has not, but the opinions of individual voters regarding the truth of the matter may differ because of their differing perspectives on the event. Voters positioned far from the event may be unable to accurately assess the outcome compared to those positioned nearby. In practice, however, voters' opinions may not be independently distributed. For example, the voters may talk among themselves before their opinions are gathered. This can distort the distribution of opinions, and introduce correlations into voter reports, preventing recovery of the true outcome. For example, if an announcer states that the ball did cross the line, then voters who did not observe this may report this authoritative opinion rather than their own.

Equity‐based incentives and shareholder say‐on‐pay

AbstractWe study the relationship between CEO pay‐performance sensitivity, pay‐risk sensitivity, and shareholder voting outcomes as part of the “say‐on‐pay” provision of the 2010 US Dodd‐Frank Act. Consistent with our hypothesis, we provide evidence that shareholders tend to approve of compensation packages that are more sensitive to changes in stock price (pay‐performance sensitivity). Our findings are consistent with theoretical predictions that outside owners approve of equity incentives as a means of aligning managers' interests with those of shareholders. We also document that future changes to equity‐based incentives are related to voting outcomes and that shareholders incorporate CFO incentives into their votes. Collectively, these results provide evidence of the importance of equity‐based incentives from the perspective of those most concerned with firm value and of the effectiveness of say‐on‐pay as a governance mechanism.

Estimating preferences for the performing arts from referendum votes

The value of the performing arts to the population can be elicited from referendum outcomes. The analyses typically rely on the (strong) assumption of full voter turnout. I show theoretically that when turnout is ignored, coefficients of variables related positively (negatively) to turnout yield upward (downward)-biased coefficients. For an empirical application, I use the example of a 2009 referendum in the Swiss canton of St.Gallen regarding the public financing of the local theater. Taking into account the turnout decision yields statistically but not economically different estimates. Bayesian model averaging suggests that income, old age, political orientation, and travel time to the theater are most closely related to the vote outcome. The analysis is complemented by comparing voter characteristics from post-ballot surveys with municipal characteristics. Voters tend to exhibit characteristics which are positive drivers of support for the referendum. This suggests that support for cultural spending among voters might be larger than among the overall population.

Computational geometry and the U.S. Supreme Court

We use the United States Supreme Court as an illuminative context in which to discuss three different spatial voting preference models: an instance of the widely used single-peaked preferences, and two models that are more novel in which vote outcomes have a strength in addition to a location. We introduce each model from a formal axiomatic perspective, briefly discuss practical motivation for each in terms of judicial behavior, prove mathematical relationships among the voting coalitions compatible with each model, and then study the two-dimensional setting by presenting computational tools for working with the models and by exploring these with judicial voting data from the Supreme Court.

Liberals should pray for rain: weather, opportunity costs of voting and electoral outcomes in South Korea

ABSTRACTStudies suggest that rainfall on an election day benefits the Republican Party in the United States and conservative parties in Western Europe. A common explanation is that marginal voters, whose turnout decisions can be affected by weather conditions, are more likely to be supporters of liberal parties. This paper shows that bad weather on an election day instead benefits the liberal parties in South Korea, where election days are designated as special holidays. Young voters, who tend to prefer liberal parties, often plan other activities whose feasibility is contingent on good weather conditions; as a result, they are more likely to turn out, and thus to provide additional electoral support to liberal parties, when weather is bad.

Binary Collective Choice with Multiple Premises

Imagine a group of individuals faces a yes-no type question whose answer is logically determined by multiple premises. There are two salient types of procedures to aggregate individual judgments -- the ``premise-based way'' (PBW) and the ``conclusion-based way'' (CBW). We derive necessary and sufficient conditions under which two procedures are universally ordered. If (and only if) a decision problem takes a ``conjunctive'' form, PBW derives a positive collective judgment (i.e., ``yes'') whenever CBW does. Furthermore, if we replace ``conjunctive'' with ``disjunctive'' in the previous line, PBW derives a negative collective judgment (i.e., ``no'') whenever PBW does. These observations highlight the fact that these two procedures are a mathematical dual of each another. Asymptotic properties are also studied. Under classical Condorcetian assumptions, PBW ensures the probability that the voting outcome is correct converges to one as the size of a group tends to infinity, whereas this holds for CBW only if an additional condition is satisfied.

Does Music Quality Matter for Audience Voters in a Music Contest?

There are numerous studies analyzing factors of success in media-broadcasted artistic con-tests, especially music competitions. However, one factor that is generally neglected in the literature is the quality of the artistic performances (i.e. “music quality”). In this paper, we approach this re-search gap by developing two novel concepts of music quality and by employing unique measures during the empirical analysis of a popular German music television contest in order to analyze how different dimensions of the music and performance quality influences the final voting results. We use the complete historical voting dataset of the music contest from its inception in 2005 until its last broadcast in 2015, collecting 2,816 observations in total. First, we define dimensions of “objective quality” according to insights from musicological research/literature. Second, we conceptualize dimensions of “subjective quality” because music preferences may be subjective and are not necessarily based on how experts’ define “good” music. We measure these subjective dimensions in an experimental setting with students from two German universities. Our analysis shows that different quality dimensions affect the outcome of voting results in different ways and not all quality dimensions reveal themselves as significant. In general, subjective quality dimensions turn out to be more relevant than objective ones. The differentiated results of our analysis support the value of our approach to deconstruct quality into different dimensions and test them individually.

Social Welfare in Growth Models with Heterogeneous Agents

«Вестник Санкт-Петербургского университета. Экономика» — научно-теоретический рецензируемый журнал, обобщающий результаты исследований ученых всего мира в различных областях науки, включая мировую экономику, историю развития экономики и экономической мысли, финансы, кредит и страхование, теорию и практику управления, статистику и учет, экономико-математическое моделирование.

Agenda Manipulation under Doctrinal Paradox

A group of individuals faces a multi-valued proposition whose truth-value is logically driven from many preliminary propositions. An agenda-setter aims at manipulating the voting outcome by choosing which propositions to ask the group. The strategies of the agenda-setter are formally defined as a class of aggregation procedures that satisfy our democratic axiom. Within this class, we characterize a novel aggregation procedure that uniformly dominates all other procedures in the sense that the outcome of this procedure is always greater than the outcomes of any other procedures, regardless of how voters cast their ballots. Conversely, the mathematical dual of this procedure is uniformly dominated by all other procedures. These results clarify to what extent an agenda-setter can unambiguously manipulate the voting outcome before opening a ballot box.

Vote Buying in the US Congress

We assess the influence of moneyed interests on legislative decisions. Our theory predicts that the vote outcome distribution and donation flows in a legislature feature a discontinuity at the approval threshold of bills if special interest groups are involved in vote buying. Testing the theoretical predictions based on two decades of roll-call voting in the U.S. House, we identify the link between narrowly passed bills and well-timed campaign contributions. Several pieces of evidence substantiate our main finding, suggesting that moneyed interests exert remarkably effective control over the passage of contested bills

Flexible Majority Rules for Cryptocurrency Issuance

We explore democratic currency issuance with flexible majority rules. With flexible majority rules, the vote-share needed to approve a particular currency issuance growth is increasing with this growth rate. By choosing suitable flexible majority rules, socially optimal growth rates can be achieved in simple settings. By adding a communication stage, in which agents can reveal their preferences for currency growth, the voting process only needs three rounds. With fewer rounds, agents can manipulate the voting outcome. Finally, we show that optimal money growth rates are realized if agents entering financial contracts anticipate ensuing inflation rates determined by these flexible majority rules.

The individual determinants of support for open space bond referendums

The ubiquitous use of ballot referendums in the public finance of land conservation means that conservation policy is often made at the individual voter level. However, studies to date have relied on either aggregate vote outcomes or surveys of residents of small geographic areas facing high growth. In this article, we utilize an original national survey to investigate a series of questions that pertain to individual opinion on open space preservation with a special focus on respondents’ perception of open space in their community. We find that most demographic variables that are determinants of open space and land use preferences in studies that use aggregate data and cover a limited geographic range are not statistically significant in our models. We also find that perceptions about the amount of open space available in ones’ community, not objective open space measurements, are a statistically significant and robust determinant of open space bond support. Our results indicate that policy advocates may be able to increase the probability of support for public financing of open space preservation by focusing on people’s perceptions of the scarcity and disappearance of open space.

Explaining Electoral Change in the 2018 US Midterm Elections: The Three Components of Electoral Mandates

AbstractWhy did the American electorate elect a solid majority of Republicans to the House in 2016 and then 2 years later replace it with a solid majority of Democrats? This article revives the idea of an electoral mandate and applies it to the 2016 and 2018 elections. It proposes a trinity of partisan attitudes serving as the components of electoral mandates: performance, values, and leadership. The election of President Trump in 2016 depended on a mix of performance evaluations (a weak economy) favoring the Republicans and leadership evaluations (Trump’s behavior difficulties) muted by value considerations (conservative anger at being unrepresented and the necessity of a choice between Trump and Clinton). These offsetting partisan attitudes made the election close enough that a small number of votes in key states decided the electoral vote outcome. In 2018, performance evaluations again favored Republicans, but now because they presided over a stronger economy. Evaluations of Trump’s leadership remained negative. The interaction of values with these leadership assessments now favored Democrats. As the out-party, polarized liberals were motivated by anti-Trump anger. Never-Trump conservatives who had drifted back to vote Republican at the end of the 2016 campaign did not feel that same pressure without the presidency being at stake. About two-thirds of voters in 2018 said their vote was about Trump. Republicans lost to Democrats among these voters by 16 percentage points. Republicans delivered on their 2016 mandate to boost the economy, but had failed to provide leadership that many Americans could feel comfortable with.

Competing Principals and Non-Vote Decisions in the European Parliament

Abstract This article analyses the effects of competing principals on legislators’ decisions not to vote in the European Parliament. We argue that Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are likely to decide not to vote to avoid defecting from either the national party or the European political group when both political principals disagree. Moreover, the article demonstrates that competing demands between principals interact with the expected closeness of a vote. MEPs are more likely to opt for not voting when they have few chances to influence the vote outcome and are torn between the two main principals. Based on a novel data set on individual votes in the 2009–2014 term, this article demonstrates that competing demands moderate the effect of the expected vote closeness on non-vote decisions and highlights the need to incorporate this type of legislative non-response in future research.

Electronic Proxy Statement Dissemination and Shareholder Monitoring

This study examines how the means of disseminating proxy statements affects shareholder monitoring. I exploit the staggered implementation of a regulatory change that allows firms to switch from postal mail to electronic distribution, and estimate that electronic dissemination reduces total voting participation by about 1% to 2%. Under the plausible assumption that all shareholder non-participation is from retail investors, my results imply that retail investor voting non-participation increases by approximately 7% to 17% with electronic distribution. The reduction in retail investor participation shifts routine voting outcomes in favor of management’s recommendations and shift voting outcomes against for non-routine votes. Consistent with management understanding the importance of dissemination channels, I further show management strategically uses its discretion over the choice of the proxy statement dissemination channel to affect voting.

The behaviour of betting and currency markets on the night of the EU referendum

We study the behaviours of the Betfair betting market and the sterling/dollar exchange rate (futures price) during 24 June 2016, the night of the EU referendum. We investigate how the two markets responded to the announcement of the voting results by employing a Bayesian updating methodology to update prior opinion about the likelihood of the final outcome of the vote. We then relate the voting model to the real-time evolution of the market-determined prices as the results were announced. We find that, although both markets appear to be inefficient in absorbing the new information contained in the vote outcomes, the betting market seems less inefficient than the FX market. The different rates of convergence to the fundamental value between the two markets lead to highly profitable arbitrage opportunities.

The geographic evolution of political cleavages in Switzerland: A network approach to assessing levels and dynamics of polarization between local populations.

Scholarly studies and common accounts of national politics enjoy pointing out the resilience of ideological divides among populations. Building on the image of political cleavages and geographic polarization, the regionalization of politics has become a truism across Northern democracies. Left unquestioned, this geography plays a central role in shaping electoral and referendum campaigns. In Europe and North America, observers identify recurring patterns dividing local populations during national votes. While much research describes those patterns in relation to ethnicity, religious affiliation, historic legacy and party affiliation, current approaches in political research lack the capacity to measure their evolution over time or other vote subsets. This article introduces “Dyadic Agreement Modeling” (DyAM), a transdisciplinary method to assess the evolution of geographic cleavages in vote outcomes by implementing a metric of agreement/disagreement through Network Analysis. Unlike existing approaches, DyAM offers a stable measure for political agreement and disagreement—accounting for chance, statistically robust and remaining structurally independent from the number of entries and missing data. The method opens up to a range of statistical, structural and visual tools specific to Network Analysis and its usage across disciplines. In order to illustrate DyAM, I use more than 680,000 municipal outcomes from Swiss federal popular votes and assess the evolution of political cleavages across local populations since 1981. Results suggest that political congruence between Swiss local populations increased in the last forty years, while regional political factions and linguistic alignments have lost their salience to new divides. I discuss how choices about input parameters and data subsets nuance findings, and consider confounding factors that may influence conclusions over the dynamic equilibrium of national politics and the strengthening effect of globalization on democratic institutions.

Knowing is not loving: media effects on knowledge about and attitudes toward the EU

ABSTRACTMedia provide the public with information related to the European Union which may alter individuals’ perceptions, ultimately resulting in changes in performance evaluations of the EU. Knowledge gains may be an important mediator in this process. We present data from a study in the context of the 2016 Bratislava summit in which the Heads of the Union’s governments discussed the outcome of the Brexit vote and the EU’s future. A panel survey assessed the relationship between exposure to media content, event-related knowledge gains, and changes in attitudes towards the European Union. Our results show that when attending to news about the summit, citizens attain event-related knowledge which negatively affects EU performance evaluations. We discuss our findings in light of the role media play in informing the European citizenry.

The real effects of proxy advisors on the firm

AbstractThis paper examines the influence of proxy advisors (PA) on firm voting outcomes, policies, and value. We measure PA influence with shareholders' historical propensity to follow PA recommendations. PA influence increases the impact of PA recommendations on proxy voting outcomes and firm policies. When shareholders have private incentives to engage in costly research in the absence of a proxy advisor, PA influence neither harms nor benefits shareholder value. However, at firms with dispersed shareholders PA influence can increase value. Our findings are consistent with theories of voting in which proxy advisors compete with private information acquisition efforts by large shareholders.