票决民主中的票决困境解析

票决民主在具体运行过程中,时常遭遇到诸如某些投票者的经济人属性、投票规则弊病、投票选择的非真实性和不完全性、投票者的有限理性、信息不对称、代表俘获与代表性不足等多重困境.这些困境的存在既意味着票决民主的不尽善尽美性,也对其有效运转构成了严峻挑战.只有审慎地对待这些困境并找寻救治的药方,我们才能避免盲目地制造票决民主的神话和在社会主义民主政治建设进程中付出不必要的代价.     

The Epistemic Edge of Majority Voting Over Lottery Voting

I aim to explain why majority voting can be assumed to have an epistemic edge over lottery voting. This would provide support for majority voting as the appropriate decision mechanism for deliberative epistemic accounts of democracy. To argue my point, I first recall the usual arguments for majority voting: maximal decisiveness, fairness as anonymity, and minimal decisiveness. I then show how these arguments are over inclusive as they also support lottery voting. I then present a framework to measure accuracy so as to compare the two decision mechanisms. I go over four arguments for lottery voting and three arguments for majority voting that support their respective accuracy. Lottery voting is then shown to have, compared to majority voting, a decreased probability of discrimination. That is, I argue that with lottery voting it is less probable under conditions of normal politics that if the procedure selects X, X is reasonable. I then provide two case scenarios for each voting mechanism that illustrate my point.     

Values and Voting

We examined relations of the 10 types of values in Schwartz's (1992) theory of voting. Hypotheses were generated by relating the core motivations of each value type to the ideological messages conveyed by party policies and symbols. Eight parties that ran in the 1988 Israeli elections were arrayed by judges on three ideological dimensions: classical liberalism, economic egalitarianism, state and religion. Discriminant analyses yielded a function whose coefficients for value types corresponded to hypotheses for the state and religion dimension and ordered party supporters on this dimension. After dropping religious parties, another value-based function ordered party supporters on the classical liberalism dimension, as predicted. Both functions significantly improved the party classification of voters in a representative national sample (N=769). Economic egalitarianism, a nonsalient dimension in Israeli politics, was unrelated to values. Results suggest that all types of values may be politically relevant depending on context.     

Voting by Eliminating Quantifiers

Mathematical theory of voting and social choice has attracted much attention. In the general setting one can view social choice as a method of aggregating individual, often conflicting preferences and making a choice that is the best compromise. How preferences are expressed and what is the “best compromise” varies and heavily depends on a particular situation. The method we propose in this paper depends on expressing individual preferences of voters and specifying properties of the resulting ranking by means of first-order formulas. Then, as a technical tool, we use methods of second-order quantifier elimination to analyze and compute results of voting. We show how to specify voting, how to compute resulting rankings and how to verify voting protocols.     

Voting in Bad Faith

What is wrong with participating in a democratic decision-making process, and then doing something other than the outcome of the decision? It is often thought that collective decision-making entails being prima facie bound to the outcome of that decision, although little analysis has been done on why that is the case. Conventional perspectives are inadequate to explain its wrongness. I offer a new and more robust analysis on the nature of voting: voting when you will accept the outcome only if the decision goes your way is an act of bad faith: you are not taking part in a ‘process that decides what we will do’. This analysis sheds light on understanding the intrinsic nature of voting and what we are doing when we make decisions collectively.     

Logic and Majority Voting

Journal of Philosophical Logic - To investigate the relationship between logical reasoning and majority voting, we introduce logic with groups Lg in the style of Gentzen’s sequent calculus,...     

The Effects of Mandatory Time Limits in the Voting Booth on Liberal-conservative Voting Patterns

One hundred and forty college students, in either (a) 2-minute time-limit or (b) a no-time-limit condition, voted their conscience on actual pending legislation in their state in a test of hypothesis that such time limits in the voting booth created a stimulus overload situation. Such a situation was expected to result in dysfunctional adaptation responses, with unintended effects on voting patterns. Results indicated that subjects in the time stress condition voted significantly more conservatively on these issues. This conservative shift is interpreted as a function of overload, with serious political implications for urban planners, whose response to increasing population density often has been to increase the tempo by which citizens are processed through the cities'institutional and social services.     

Regulatory Fit and Voting1

The problem of many democracies is low voter turnout. One reason is the voting procedure, which only allows voting for a party or candidate. Introduction of voting against could bring more voters to the polls. The concept of regulatory focus ( Higgins, 1998 ) suggests that people who focus on prevention would vote more eagerly if they are given the opportunity to blackball disliked candidates. This article describes 2 studies that verify this hypothesis. In the first study, over two thirds of participants declared that they would vote more willingly if they had a “for or against” choice at the election. The second study shows that the “pro or anti” formula is especially attractive to participants with a prevention regulatory focus.     

Reexamining the Calculus of Voting

This study applies social cognitive theory to the study of voter turnout, examining the effects of self‐efficacy on citizens' decisions of whether or not to vote. Consistent with recent arguments in cognitive psychology ( Fenton‐O'Creevy, Nicholson, Soane, & Willman, 2003, 2005 ), I argue that excessive perceptions of self‐efficacy lead some citizens to overestimate their vote's impact in close elections and to vote as a consequence of these perceptions. This illusion of control is further engendered by the features of skill‐based activities such as choice, personal involvement, stimulus familiarity, and exertion of effort ( Langer, 1975 ) that are inherent in the act of voting. Employing both cross‐sectional and panel data, I find that individuals with high levels of self‐efficacy are more likely to be moved to vote by perceptions that an election will be close than are citizens with low levels of self‐efficacy.     

An Indirect Argument for Strategic Voting

abstract   A common bit of public political wisdom advises that in certain three-way elections, one should cast a strategic vote for one of the top two candidates rather than a conscience-driven vote for a third candidate, since doing otherwise amounts to 'throwing one's vote away'. In this paper, I examine the possible justifications for this pragmatic advice to vote strategically. I argue that the most direct argument behind such advice fails to motivate strategic voting in large-scale elections, since there is no significant chance that one's own vote will alter the outcome of the election, even in plausible close-call cases. In short, the lack of probable pragmatic effect undermines the pragmatic motivation for altering one's baseline voting behavior. However, an indirect argument succeeds in motivating strategic voting in some scenarios. Such an indirect argument relies on the possibility of one acquiring an obligation to engage in public strategic campaigning for one of the top two candidates. In many cases in which one strategically campaigns, one will, indirectly, acquire an obligation to vote strategically in accord with one's prior public campaign activities. Thus, the common bit of political wisdom about strategic voting can be justified, though only indirectly.     

Registration and Voting in a Patriotic Organization

Summary

A positive relationship between firstborns and need affiliation and school activities was found among 56 high school males who were given the need affiliation EPPS scale. Urban youths had higher need affiliation scores, but the number of activities engaged in were no greater than among rural Ss. The rural later born child has significantly lower need affiliation scores, suggesting a strong rural/urban effect which is not apparent among firstborns.     

基于候选人面孔的特质推理与投票决策

在竞选情境中, 基于政治候选人面孔的能力或热情特质推理可以预测选举结果。面孔吸引力、面孔成熟度、面部表情和面孔熟悉度等因素对基于面孔的特质推理预测竞选结果起着重要作用。近年来, 研究者已经由基于面孔预测结果的行为研究逐步扩展到神经机制的研究上, 采用fMRI技术发现当被试对候选人面孔做负性特质判断和投票时, 杏仁核、岛叶、腹前侧扣带回等脑区会被激活, 而获胜候选人的照片并不会引起脑区的激活。研究者从认知取向和进化适应角度解释了人们为什么会根据面孔中的特质推理进行预测。以往研究在实验材料、研究内容等方面仍有不足, 这也指明了未来的研究方向。     

Voting Intentions and the 1980 Carter-Reagan Debate1

A study was conducted to assess the impact of the 1980 Carter-Reagan debate on subsequent voting intentions. As predicted, perceptions of Reagan's debate performance significantly affected respondents' post-debate intention to vote for him; perceptions of Carter's debate performance were not significantly related to post-debate intentions regarding Carter. Additionally, it was found that while party identification had a predictable effect on debate perceptions (Republican respondents favoring Reagan; Democratic respondents favoring Carter), this effect did not prevent respondents from also making more “objective” assessments of the candidates' performance. Within the general context of viewing “their” candidate more favorably, respondents (1) perceived Carter as more honest in the debate, (2) perceived Reagan as stronger, and (3) perceived Reagan as performing better overall in the debate.