Approximate Inference of Outcomes in Probabilistic Elections

Theoretical spatial models of electoral voting tend to predict either convergence to an electoral mean (when voting is probabilistic) or chaos (when voting is deterministic). Here, we construct an empirical model of voting for the Israeli Knesset in 1992 (based on a large electoral sample and on analysis of party declarations). The probabilistic voting model so estimated fits the known election results. We then use the same model to simulate the effect of expected vote maximization by the parties. Contrary to the usual results, there is no unique convergent Nash equilibrium under this objective function. We do infer, however, that the two large parties are “Downsian”, in the sense that they maximize expected vote (up to the margin of error of the model). We suggest that the empirical results are compatible with a hybrid model of utility maximization, where each party computes the effects of its policy declaration both in terms of electoral response and of post-election coalition negotations.

Should You Want An Educated Mayor? Evidence from Close Elections in Italy

Geographical AnalysisVolume 14, Issue 4 p. 355-365 Free Access Uncovering Structural Effects in Ecological Data: An Entropy-Maximizing Approach R. J. Johnston, R. J. Johnston R. J. Johnston is professor of geography, University of Sheffield. The survey data used in this paper were obtained from the British Election Study data deposited in the S.S.R.C. Survey Data Archive. I am grateful to the depositors for making the data available, to the staff of the Archive for their assistance, to Neville Baines for help with the programming, and to the Department of Geography, University of Sheffield for a grant towards the costs of acquiring the data.Search for more papers by this author R. J. Johnston, R. J. Johnston R. J. Johnston is professor of geography, University of Sheffield. The survey data used in this paper were obtained from the British Election Study data deposited in the S.S.R.C. Survey Data Archive. I am grateful to the depositors for making the data available, to the staff of the Archive for their assistance, to Neville Baines for help with the programming, and to the Department of Geography, University of Sheffield for a grant towards the costs of acquiring the data.Search for more papers by this author First published: October 1982 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1538-4632.1982.tb00754.xCitations: 12 R. J. Johnston is professor of geography, University of Sheffield. The survey data used in this paper were obtained from the British Election Study data deposited in the S.S.R.C. Survey Data Archive. I am grateful to the depositors for making the data available, to the staff of the Archive for their assistance, to Neville Baines for help with the programming, and to the Department of Geography, University of Sheffield for a grant towards the costs of acquiring the data. AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditWechat LITERATURE CITED Alford, R. R. (1963). Party and Society. Chicago: Rand McNally. Bacharach, M. (1970). Biproportional Matrices and Input-Output Change. Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press. Bishop, Y. M., S. E. Fienberg, and P. W. Holland (1975). Discrete Multivariate Analysis. Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press. Butler, D. E., and M. Pinto-Dischinsky (1971). The British General Election of 1970. London: Macmillan. Butler, D. E., and D. Stokes (1974). Political Change in Britain. Second edition. 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Hay (1982). “On the Parameters of Uniform Swing in Single-Member Constituency Systems. Environment and Planning A, 14, 61– 74. Johnston, R. J., A. M. Hay, and P. J. Taylor (1982). “Estimating the Sources of Spatial Change in Election Results: A Multi-Proportional Matrix Approach. Environment and Planning A, 14, 000– 00. Jones, K., and I. S. Evans (1981). “ Ratios and Closed Number Systems”. In Quantitative Geography, edited by N. Wrigley and R. J. Bennett, pp. 123– 34. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Miller, W. L. (1977). Electoral Dynamics. London: Macmillan. Rose, R. (1974). Electoral Behavior. New York: The Free Press. Senior, M. L. (1979). “From Gravity Modelling to Entropy Maximizing: A Pedagogic Guide. Progress in Human Geography, 3, 179– 210. Steed, M. (1975). “ The Results Analysed”. In The British General Election of October 1974, edited by D. E. Butler and D. Kavanagh, pp. 330– 56. London: Macmillan. Taylor, P. J., and R. J. Johnston (1979). Geography of Elections. London: Penguin. Wilson, A. G. (1970). Entropy in Urban and Regional Modelling. London: Pion. Wright, G. C. (1977). “Contextual Models of Voting Behavior: The Southern Wallace Vote. American Political Science Review, 71, 497– 508. Wrigley, N. (1973). “The Use of Percentages in Geographical Research. Area, 5, 183– 86. Citing Literature Volume14, Issue4October 1982Pages 355-365 ReferencesRelatedInformation

The margin of victory of an election, defined as the smallest number k such that k voters can change the winner by voting differently, is an important measurement for robustness of the election outcome. It also plays an important role in implementing efficient post-election audits, which has been widely used in the United States to detect errors or fraud caused by malfunctions of electronic voting machines.

Influence among individuals is at the core of collective social phenomena such as the dissemination of ideas, beliefs or behaviors, social learning and the diffusion of innovations. Different mechanisms have been proposed to implement inter-agent influence in social models from the voter model, to majority rules, to the Granoveter model. Here we advance in this direction by confronting the recently introduced Social Influence and Recurrent Mobility (SIRM) model, that reproduces generic features of vote-shares at different geographical levels, with data in the US presidential elections. Our approach incorporates spatial and population diversity as inputs for the opinion dynamics while individuals' mobility provides a proxy for social context, and peer imitation accounts for social influence. The model captures the observed stationary background fluctuations in the vote-shares across counties. We study the so-called political strongholds, i.e., locations where the votes-shares for a party are systematically higher than average. A quantitative definition of a stronghold by means of persistence in time of fluctuations in the voting spatial distribution is introduced, and results from the US Presidential Elections during the period 1980-2012 are analyzed within this framework. We compare electoral results with simulations obtained with the SIRM model finding a good agreement both in terms of the number and the location of strongholds. The strongholds duration is also systematically characterized in the SIRM model. The results compare well with the electoral results data revealing an exponential decay in the persistence of the strongholds with time.

When scheduling public works or events in a shared facility one needs to accommodate preferences of a population. We formalize this problem by introducing the notion of a collective schedule. We show how to extend fundamental tools from social choice theory - positional scoring rules, the Kemeny rule and the Condorcet principle - to collective scheduling. We study the computational complexity of finding collective schedules. We also experimentally demonstrate that optimal collective schedules can be found for instances with realistic sizes.

Election databases are the main elements of a recently introduced framework that aims to create bridges between the computational social choice and the data management communities. An election database consists of incomplete information about the preferences of voters, in the form of partial orders, alongside with standard database relations that provide contextual information. Earlier work in computational social choice focused on the computation of possible winners and necessary winners that are determined by the available incomplete information and the voting rule at hand. The presence of the relational context, however, permits the formulation of sophisticated queries about voting rules, candidates, potential winners, issues, and positions on issues. Such queries can be given possible answer semantics and necessary answer semantics on an election database, where the former means that the query is true on some completion of the given partial orders and the latter means that the query is true on every such completion. %In this paper, łooseness = -1 We carry out a systematic investigation of query evaluation on election databases by analyzing how the interaction between the partial preferences, the voting rules and the relational context impacts on the complexity of query evaluation. To this effect, we focus on positional scoring rules and unions of conjunctive queries. We establish a number of results that delineate the complexity of the possible answers and of the necessary answers for different positional scoring rules and for various classes of unions of conjunctive queries. Furthermore, we show that query evaluation is fixed-parameter tractable, where the parameter is the number of candidates in the election.

Past research has impressively shown that the physical attractiveness of politicians influences their electoral success. A large part of the existing literature analyses single-member constituencies in parliamentary elections, presidential elections and open lists in proportional representation systems. In contrast, relatively little is known about the effects of the physical attractiveness of front-runners in multiple member constituencies. This paper fills the research gap. Taking the 2004 European Parliament elections as an example, it analyses the influence of front-runners’ physical attractiveness on the electoral success of their respective parties and combined lists. Voter behaviour is captured by real-life election results in the 64 constituencies of the 2004 European Parliament elections. The attractiveness of the front-runners is estimated according to the Truth-of-Consensus Method. Twenty-four students were shown portrait photographs of the candidates and were asked to rate each candidate’s attractiveness. The attractiveness score of a candidate is then computed by averaging the different ratings he or she has received. Multilevel analyses show that front-runners’ attractiveness substantially influences election results.

This article explores the role of organized interests in congressional elections by examining the influence of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in contested House races in 1994 and 1996. Most research on the electoral impact of organized interests reports that groups have a negligible impact on the outcome. Yet anecdotal evidence regarding NRA influence abounds, particularly in 1994. We construct an aggregate model of congressional vote share that allows us to systematically analyse the electoral impact of the NRA in 1994 and 1996 House races. Unlike previous research of this sort, we provide evidence that the NRA can have a statistically discernible effect on election outcomes, but not in all elections and for all candidates. The NRA endorsement was particularly helpful to Republican challengers in 1994 (and to some extent Republican incumbents), but much less helpful to Democrats. These effects are much reduced in 1996 for all candidates. Likewise, having lots of NRA members in the district helped Republican challengers the most (in 1994) and Democrats not at all. Finally, reasons as to why the NRA was able to amplify but not mitigate the party trend, as well as individual-level mechanisms that might produce an endorsement effect, are discussed.

Positional scoring rules in voting compute the score of an alternative by summing the scores for the alternative induced by every vote. This summation principle ensures that all votes contribute equally to the score of an alternative. We relax this assumption and, instead, aggregate scores by taking into account the rank of a score in the ordered list of scores obtained from the votes. This defines a new family of voting rules, rank-dependent scoring rules (RDSRs), based on ordered weighted average (OWA) operators, which, include all scoring rules, and many others, most of which of new. We study some properties of these rules, and show, empirically, that certain RDSRs are less manipulable than Borda voting, across a variety of statistical cultures.

The conditional mean value has applications in regression analysis and in financial mathematics, because they are used in it. We can find papers from recent years that use the conditional mean value in fuzzy cases. As the intuitionstic fuzzy sets are an extension of fuzzy sets, we will try to define a conditional mean value for the intuitionistic fuzzy case. The conditional mean value in crisp intuitionistic fuzzy events was first studied by V. Valenčáková in 2009. She used Gödel connectives. Her approach can only be used for special cases of intuitionistic fuzzy events, therefore, we want to define a conditional mean value for all elements of a family of intuitionistic fuzzy events. In this paper, we define the conditional mean value for intuitionistic fuzzy events using Lukasiewicz connectives. We use a Kolmogorov approach and the notions from a classical probability theory for construction. B. Riečan formulated a conditional intuitionistic fuzzy probability for intuitionistic fuzzy events using an intuitionistic fuzzy state in 2012. In classical cases, there exists a connection between the conditional probability and the conditional mean value, therefore we show a connection between the conditional intuitionistic fuzzy probability induced by the intuitionistic fuzzy state and the conditional intuitionistic fuzzy mean value.

The purpose of this study is to analyze 3rd, 4th and 5th graders' probability understanding and raise issues concerning instructional methods and search for the possibility of learning probability. For the purpose, a descriptive study through pencil-and-paper test regarding fairness, sample space, probability of event, probability comparison, independence and conditional probability was conducted. The following conclusions were drawn from the results obtained in this study. First, the 3rd, 4th, and 5th grade students scored the highest in the sample space questions. In descending order of skill, the students scored the highest in sample space following probability of events, fairness and probability comparison. Second, however, the level of independence understanding was low. There was no meaningful differences between grades and the conditional probability was the least understood. The independence is difficult to develop naturally according to cognitive development. The conditional probability recognizing the probability of an event changes in non-replacement situations was very difficult for these students. Third, there were significant differences between the 5th graders and the 3rd and 4th graders in the probability comparison questions. It shows that 5th graders understand the concept of proportion when they compare equal ratio probability of an event. The 3rd graers could do different ratio probability of an event more easily than equal ratio probability of an event after they were instructed on probability comparison.

We investigate the connection between legislative parties and election outcomes, focusing on ideological party brand names that inform voters. If the source of information conveyed by brand names is the party's aggregate roll-call record, then changes in legislative party membership should influence election returns. We formalize the argument with an expected utility model of voting and derive district-level hypotheses, which we test on U.S. House elections from 1952 to 2000. We test alternative specifications that vary with respect to the specificity of voter information and find that party positions and heterogeneity both affect vote share independently of incumbents’ positions. The results provide modest support for the expected utility model but nevertheless suggest that Congress is an important source of the public's beliefs about the parties, and this effect is clearest for challengers, rather than incumbents, who run under the party's label.

The Economy, the War in Iraq and the 2004 Presidential Election

Many countries have a system of electing members to their governing bodies through district-based elections. In each district, the party with maximum votes wins the corresponding "seat" in the governing body. However, the final seat distribution is strongly dependent on the geographical distribution of voters of different parties, and the party with most (or least) voters may not win the most (or least) number of seats if their voters are non-homogeneously distributed over the districts. This is further complicated in heterogeneous societies, where political preference of voters depends on their social identities, which is also related to their districts of residence. Projections of outcomes by sample surveys tend to fail in such situations. The aim of this paper is to explore how electoral outcomes are influenced by the geographical distribution of voters and community-centric voting preferences. We consider agent-based modeling of voters along with their locations, community memberships and voting preference. Our models represent the relations between these factors with their uncertainties through conditional probability distributions involving latent variables with Dirichlet Processes. Our models also represent spatio-temporal factors in elections - how geographical proximity between districts influence the voting preferences, and swing of votes across successive elections. We propose two novel models for vote swing between successive elections based on Dirichlet Processes, which is far more powerful than the existing models of Uniform Swing and Proportional Swing. For any choice of parameters, our models can be used to simulate a full election by Monte Carlo Sampling, and such simulations provide us a range of possible outcomes. We can also simulate surveys and study how their projections can deviate from the actual results. We discuss inference approaches to estimate the parameters to fit the model to actual district-based elections held in India.