Behavioral Heterogeneity Under Approval and Plurality Voting

How widespread is strategic voting in two-round electoral systems, and which types of voters are most likely to engage in such behavior? While runoff elections are common in presidential systems around the world, research on strategic voting in these settings remains limited. This paper explores four different types of strategic behavior that are possible in two-round systems, including some types, such as “strong-to-weak” strategic voting, which are not possible in single-shot elections. We use a nationwide survey to assess the incidence and correlates of strategic voting in Brazil’s 2018 presidential election, where thirteen candidates competed in the first round. We find evidence of “weak-to-strong” strategic voting at a similar rate to that documented in single-round elections in other countries. We find little evidence of other types of strategic voting. Furthermore, we show that voters’ confidence in their predictions of the likely electoral outcome and their ideological preferences strongly predict strategic voting. These results point to the importance of accounting for voter beliefs and attitudes in addition to objective voter characteristics to explain strategic voting.

Strategic voting in British elections

We propose a model where voters are embedded in a social network. Each voter observes the ballots of her neighbors in the network, from which she infers the likely outcome of the election. Each voter may then revise her vote strategically, to maximize her expected utility. Our work focuses on plurality voting, where strategic voting is a major concern. We show that in practice, strategization increases with voter knowledge, yet can improve the social welfare for the population. Real world social networks exhibit a property called homophily; sometimes called ``The Echo Chamber Effect'', which is the tendency for friends to have similar ideologies. We find that homophily dampens the benefits of strategization, and correspondingly, lowers the frequency of its occurrence. This effect may contribute to the low number of strategic voters observed in real world elections. Additionally, strategization may lead to the elimination of less popular candidates, as voters revise their votes to less preferred but more hopeful candidates. This phenomenon is known as Duverger's Law in political science, and we show that it does not hold in certain network structures.

The literature on strategic voting has provided evidence that some electors support large parties at the voting booth to avoid wasting their vote on a preferred but uncompetitive smaller party. In this paper we argue that district conditions also elicit reactions from abstainers and other party voters. We find that, when ballot gains and losses from different types of responses to the constituency conditions are taken into account, large parties still benefit moderately from strategic behaviour, while small parties obtain substantial net ballot losses. This result stems from a model that allows for abstention in the choice set of voters, and uses counterfactual simulation to estimate the incidence of district conditions in the Spanish general elections of 2000 and 2008.

Models of strategic candidacy analyze the incentives of candidates to run in an election. Most work on this topic assumes that strategizing only takes place among candidates, whereas voters vote truthfully. In this paper, we extend the analysis to also include strategic behavior on the part of the voters. (We also study cases where only candidates or only voters are strategic.) We consider two settings in which strategic voting is well-defined and has a natural interpretation: majority-consistent voting with single-peaked preferences and voting by successive elimination. In the former setting, we analyze the type of strategic behavior required in order to guarantee desirable voting outcomes. In the latter setting, we determine the complexity of computing the set of potential outcomes if both candidates and voters act strategically.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to investigate the competency models used by organizations to assess the strategic thinking ability of their leaders, managers, and other employees.Design/methodology/approach– A basic interpretive study was conducted with human resource executives across a broad range of large organizations. Participants were interviewed, and competency models in use were shared, reviewed, and discussed. The model development process was also explored in depth. Findings were verified via member checks and triangulation.Findings– Models in use either identify strategic thinking as a stand-alone competency, or embed it under three different areas. Most cover one or more executive levels, stating varying expectations for strategic thinking by job title or level, or differentiating strategic thinking performance levels. The models include descriptions of strategic thinking behaviors that cross seven categories of strategy development, implementation, and organizational alignment.Research limitations/implications– The study provides indications of potential generalizations that should be considered with more organizations across sectors.Practical implications– The findings provide practitioners with format and content examples to enhance the assessment of strategic thinking in existing competency models, as well as process considerations for model development/revision. The findings also identify how competency model components are used across the spectrum of talent management activities.Originality/value– The study fills a gap in the literature by providing empirically based identification of the strategic thinking behaviors organizations consider essential competencies and how they are assessed. In so doing, the study provides a glimpse of how strategic thinking is used in practice and across a range of strategic management activities. In addition, the study links strategic thinking to the competency development literature, illustrating details of competency model development for strategic thinking, and identifying opportunities for related theory development in both domains.

We study the voting game where agents' preferences are endogenously decided by the information they receive, and they can collaborate in a group. We show that strategic voting behaviors have a positive impact on leading to the "correct" decision, outperforming the common non-strategic behavior of informative voting and sincere voting. Our results give merit to strategic voting for making good decisions.

Choice experiments, a survey methodology in which consumers face a series of choice tasks requiring them to indicate their most preferred option from a choice set containing two or more options are used to generate estimates of consumer preferences to determine the appropriate allocation of public resources to competing projects or programs. The analysis of choice-experimental data typically relies on the assumptions that choices of the non-status quo option are demand-revealing and choices of the status quo option are not demand-revealing, but, rather, reflect an underlying behavioral bias in favor of the status quo. This paper reports the results of an experiment demonstrating that both of those assumptions are likely to be invalid. We demonstrate that choice experiments for a public good are vulnerable to the same types of strategic voting that affect other types of multiple-choice voting mechanisms. We show that owing to the mathematics of choice-set design, what actually is strategic voting often is misinterpreted as a behavioral bias for the status quo option. Therefore, we caution against using current choice-experimental methodologies to inform policy making about public goods.

Majority Runoff Elections: Strategic Voting and Duverger's Hypothesis

The majority runoff system is widely used around the world, yet our understanding of its properties and of voters’ behavior is limited. In this paper, we fully characterize the set of strictly perfect voting equilibria in large three-candidate majority runoff elections. Considering all possible distributions of preference orderings and intensities, we prove that only two types of equilibria can exist. First, there are always equilibria in which only two candidates receive votes. Second, there may exist an equilibrium in which three candidates receive votes. Its characteristics challenge common beliefs: (i) neither sincere voting by all voters nor pushover tactics (i.e., supporters of the front-runner voting for a less preferred candidate so as to influence who will face the front-runner in the second round) are supported in equilibrium, and (ii) the winner does not necessarily have democratic legitimacy since the Condorcet winner may not even participate in the second

“The evidence renders it undeniable that a large amount of sophisticated voting occurs – mostly to the disadvantage of the third parties nationally – so that the force of Duverger's psychological factor must be considerable.” William H. Riker (1982:764). For as long as voting procedures have been used to decide important and controversial issues, there have been legislators and electors willing to vote strategically. Theoretical interest in strategic voting dates at least to Pliny the Younger (see Farquharson 1969) and probably earlier. In this chapter, I build on rather more recent and formal treatments of the strategy of voting: those framed in the decision-theoretic and game-theoretic traditions. Most of this work has appeared in the last thirty years and focuses on the behavior of legislators (e.g., Farquharson 1969; McKelvey and Niemi 1978; Miller 1980; Shepsle and Weingast 1984; Banks 1985; Austen-Smith 1987; Ordeshook and Schwartz 1987). This chapter focuses on the other, less well-trodden, branch of research into strategic voting, that dealing with the behavior of voters in mass elections. There are of course many ways to conduct a mass election. This chapter deals in particular with elections in electoral districts that satisfy the following criteria: (1) There is one seat to be filled in the district; and (2) there is only one round of voting, after which the victor is decided. There are many electoral systems that satisfy these criteria: the Anglo-American first-past-the-post system; the Australian alternative vote system; the approval voting system; and so on.

In this paper I study strategic voting behavior in the Argentine Senate election for the City of Buenos Aires in 2013. I estimate and analyze the voter transition matrix between the primary and general elections using a Bayesian hierarchical model for ecological inference, utilizing a rich data set of ballot box data. The results show that strategic behavior is not widespread among the electorate in Buenos Aires. In particular, at least 75 % of voters who had the opportunity to avoid vote wasting by behaving strategically did not. I also find high levels of vote wasting when analyzing other provinces during the same election cycle. These results suggest that these electorates might be composed of a mixture of voters with strategic and expressive motivations, where the expressive factions dominate.

This paper introduces a novel theoretical model and measure of strategic thinking in social decision making. The model distinguishes four strategic orientations: egocentric (thinking about how one’s actions shape one’s outcomes), impact (thinking about how one’s actions shapes others’ outcomes), dependency (thinking about how others’ actions shape one’s outcomes), and altercentric (thinking about how others’ actions shape their outcomes). Applying this model to explain social behavior in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, an exploratory study finds that the more people think about how their actions shape others’ outcomes, the more likely they are to: (a) comply with social distancing restrictions designed to curb the spread of the virus, and (b) donate money they received in the study to charitable organizations. These findings advance understanding of the multifaceted nature of strategic thinking and highlight the usefulness of the Strategic Thinking Scale for explaining social behavior.

Approval Voting is analyzed in a context of large elections with strategic voters: the Myerson’s Large Poisson Games. We first establish the Magnitude Equivalence Theorem which substantially reduces the complexity of computing the magnitudes of the pivot outcomes. Furthermore, we show that the Condorcet Winner need not be the Winner of the election in equilibrium under Approval Voting. Indeed, a ‘paradoxical’ example is provided where a candidate ranked first by more than half of the voters is not the Winner of the election.

This essay reasses the assumptions of the Brams-Fishburn theory of approval voting, and proposes modifications to make the theory correspond better with likely voting choices. With a small number of candidates, voters who use the ‘inadmissible’ strategy of voting for all candidates can help to produce a result that better reflects the voters' wishes than is possible with ‘admissible’ strategies, so we propose a widening of the definition of admissibility to encompass this case. With more than three candidates, we define ‘first-order admissible’ strategies, which are the most likely strategies to be used in practice, and are also strongly sincere, in that a vote for any candidate is always accompanied by votes for all more or equally-preferred candidates. Their number is less under approval voting than under plurality voting. Both proposed modifications strengthen the technical arguments favoring approval voting over plurality voting.