Strategic voting in repeated referenda

Money, debt and deficits in a dynamic game

Simple plurality election systems (commonly known as ‘first past the post’) are often associated with the dominance of two political parties. Such systems tend to reward leading parties with a disproportionately large number of seats (the ‘mechanical’ effect) and provoke tactical voting, where voters switch away from trailing parties (the ‘psychological’ effect). We view tactical voting as a coordination problem. A group of voters wish to prevent a win by a disliked party (such as the Conservatives in recent UK elections) and must partially coordinate behind a single challenger (such as Labour or the Liberal Democrats) in order to do this. Crucially, voters have limited information on the situation within their constituency and hence there is no common knowledge of the game being played—tactical voting is a global game. We show that in this setting, voters will only partially coordinate. Furthermore, tactical voting exhibits negative feedback—tactical voting by others reduces the incentive for an individual to vote tactically, since they become concerned that they may switch in the wrong direction. We calibrate our model, and apply it to the UK General Election of 1997. Throughout England, we find that the ‘mechanical’ and ‘psychological’ effects tend to offset each other: tactical voting serves to reverse the Conservative bias that results from the geographic distribution of preferences.

Strategic Voting in Two-Party Legislative Elections

A Systematic Process for Evaluating Structured Perfect Bayesian Equilibria in Dynamic Games With Asymmetric Information

This study aims to investigate the model of emotional intelligence and its use in computer games. Video games can be used to enhance emotional intelligence through active and deep learning. This article explores how emotional intelligence and gaming intersect, offering insights into how higher feelings can be formed through active and deeper learning. The analysis of existing scientific literature highlights the growing interest in creating emotional intelligence models, particularly within the realm of serious games. As part of this investigation, the author introduces a classification of emotional intelligence models that demonstrates their conceptuality. This work proposes the integration of emotional intelligence into game dynamics to enrich the landscape of emotional intelligence assessment and development. One key aspect of this approach is viewing emotional intelligence as a means to cultivate higher-order feelings, such as moral, aesthetic, social, intellectual, and the joy of knowledge and empathy. These emotions are integral elements of a “hot” system, emphasizing their relevance to authentic, non-digital cultural experiences. The dynamic emotional intelligence model introduced here serves to nurture essential skills, including situational cognitive reassessment and “emotional work”, leading to congruence in felt and expressed emotions. This model identifies the interplay of game aesthetics, mechanics, and dynamics as pivotal zones for the formation of higher feelings. The article argues that games intended to stimulate emotional intelligence should not induce a flow state that narrows the player's cognitive scope and inhibits critical thinking. To counteract this, the author suggests incorporating pauses, live communication, and reflective analysis of one's emotions within the gaming experience. The article explores the transformation of impersonal emotional intelligence test questions into game components encompassing mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics. It outlines strategies for active and deeper learning, facilitating an enriched understanding of emotional intelligence through gaming. The recommendations derived from this discussion can be applied to an array of games under the dynamic emotional intelligence model, making it a valuable resource for educational game design. The proposed dynamic model of emotional intelligence within computer games emerges as a universal and versatile tool. It can function as a pedagogical framework for the development of student's emotional intelligence, enabling educators to harness the power of games for emotional growth. This model serves as a canvas for game designers, offering creative possibilities for the development of new computer-based educational games that target emotional intelligence. This article demonstrates that playing games can indeed stimulate emotional intelligence by fostering active and deeper learning. By incorporating emotional intelligence into gaming dynamics, it is possible to create more engaging and effective learning experiences, ultimately promoting the formation of higher feelings and a deeper understanding of emotional intelligence.

“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.

Market processes can be analyzed by means of dynamic games. In a number of dynamic games multiple Nash equilibria appear. These equilibria often involve no credible threats the implementation of which is not in the interests of the players making them. The concept of sub game perfect equilibrium rules out these situations by stating that a reasonable solution to a game cannot involve players believing and acting upon noncredible threats or promises. A simple way of finding the sub game perfect Nash equilibrium of a dynamic game is by using the principle of backward induction. To explain how this equilibrium concept is applied, we analyze the dynamic entry games.

This study explores a legal and economic understanding of breach of good faith. First, it starts with a review of bona fide within the sovereign debt restructuring literature. Then, the study moves into a recent and emblematic case where a breach of good faith was invoked by minority creditors. This case illustrates controversial legal techniques that may be used for enforcing a bond restructuring which in turn rises arguments related to breach of good faith compliance. Next, the research constructs a sequential game for setting the limits of good faith in sovereign debt workouts. The concepts of subgame perfect Nash equilibrium and Pareto optimal are examined in two scenarios: an unsu­pervised debt restructuring process, and a supervised restructuring process. After this, the article studies how good faith compliance is connected to the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium and Pareto optimality. Finally, the last part briefly discusses how the legal and economic approach to a breach of good faith could be implemented in legal practice.

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. Please check back later for the full article.Narrowly understood, social choice theory is a specialized branch of applied logic and mathematics that analyzes abstract objects called preference aggregation functions, social welfare functions, and social choice functions. But more broadly, social choice theory identifies, analyzes, and evaluates rules that may be used to make collective decisions. So understood, social choice is a subfield of the social sciences that examines what may be called “voting rules” of various sorts. While social choice theory typically assumes a finite set of alternatives over which voter preferences are unrestricted, the spatial model of social choice assumes that policy alternatives can be represented by points in a space of one or more dimensions, and that voters have preferences that are plausibly shaped by this spatial structure.Social choice theory has considerable relevance for the study of legislative (as well as electoral) institutions. The concepts and tools of social choice theory make possible formal descriptions of legislative institutions such as bicameralism, parliamentary voting procedures, effects of decision rules (e.g., supramajority vs. simple majority rule and executive veto rules), sincere vs. strategic voting by legislators, agenda control, and other parliamentary maneuvers. Spatial models of social choice further enrich this analysis and raise additional questions regarding policy stability and change. Spatial models are used increasingly to guide empirical research on legislative institutions and processes.

The 2000 Mexican presidential race culminated in the election of opposition candidate Vicente Fox and the end of seven decades of one-party rule. This book, which traces changes in public opinion and voter preferences over the course of the race, represents the most comprehensive treatment of campaigning and voting behavior in an emerging democracy. It challenges the “modest effects” paradigm of national election campaigns that has dominated scholarly research in the field. Chapters cover authoritarian mobilization of voters, turnout patterns, electoral cleavages, party strategies, television news coverage, candidate debates, negative campaigning, strategic voting, issue-based voting, and the role of the 2000 election in Mexico's political transition. Theoretically-oriented introductory and concluding chapters situate Mexico's 2000 election in the larger context of Mexican politics and of cross-national research on campaigns. Collectively, these contributions provide crucial insights into Mexico's new politics, with important implications for elections in other countries.

This work presents two different voting strategies for ensemble learning on data streams based on pairwise combination of component classifiers. Despite efforts to build a diverse ensemble, there is always some degree of overlap between component classifiers models. Our voting strategies are aimed at using these overlaps to support ensemble prediction. We hypothesize that by combining pairs of classifiers it is possible to alleviate incorrect individual predictions that would otherwise negatively impact the overall ensemble decision. The first strategy, Pairwise Accuracy (PA), combines the shared accuracy estimation of all possible pairs in the ensemble, while the second strategy, Pairwise Patterns (PP), record patterns of pairwise decisions during training and use these patterns during prediction. We present empirical results comparing ensemble classifiers with their original voting methods and our proposed methods in both real and synthetic datasets, with and without concept drifts. Our analysis indicates that pairwise voting is able to enhance overall performance for PP, especially on real datasets, and that PA is useful whenever there are noticeable differences in accuracy estimates among ensemble members, which is common during concept drifts.

We introduce incomplete information to a multiparty election under proportional representation: each voter knows her preferences and votes strategically to maximize her payoffs, but is uncertain about the number and the preferences of the other voters. Parties are assumed to be purely office motivated and, hence, the resulting governments are always minimum winning. In this framework, we prove (a) generic existence of equilibria where only two parties receive a positive fraction of the votes and therefore lead to single-party governments and (b) generic inexistence of equilibria that lead to coalition governments. That is, contrary to common wisdom, a proportional rule is found not to promote sincere voting and to be favorable towards single-party governments. The existence of two-party equilibria that lead to single-party governments is robust to parties having ideological concerns.

A voting center is in charge of collecting and aggregating voter preferences. In an iterative process, the center sends comparison queries to voters, requesting them to submit their preference between two items. Voters might discuss the candidates among themselves, figuring out during the elicitation process which candidates stand a chance of winning and which do not. Consequently, strategic voters might attempt to manipulate by deviating from their true preferences and instead submit a different response in order to attempt to maximize their profit. We provide a practical algorithm for strategic voters which computes the best manipulative vote and maximizes the voter's selfish outcome when such a vote exists. We also provide a careful voting center which is aware of the possible manipulations and avoids manipulative queries when possible. In an empirical study on four real-world domains, we show that in practice manipulation occurs in a low percentage of settings and has a low impact on the final outcome. The careful voting center reduces manipulation even further, thus allowing for a non-distorted group decision process to take place. We thus provide a core technology study of a voting process that can be adopted in opinion or information aggregation systems and in crowdsourcing applications, e.g., peer grading in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs).

Communication networks typically provide a basic best-effort service category, in which resources are shared by concurrent users. As no QoS guarantees are provided, a user will submit to best-effort service only if the expected QoS meets some minimal, user-specific, requirements. This results in an inherent conflict of interest among users, which we capture through a dynamic noncooperative game model and investigate its structure and properties. Specifically, we study the operating points of such systems, i.e., their Nash equilibria. First, we investigate the optimal user strategies, which involve a prediction of the evolving system state, and show that they are of the threshold type. We then establish that a Nash equilibrium point exists and is unique. An algorithmic scheme for computing the Nash equilibrium is provided. In practice, rather than making complex predictions, users typically employ simple decision rules, based on what they learn by experience. Interestingly, it can be shown that the Nash equilibrium of the considered system is a stationary point of such learning schemes. Moreover, we demonstrate that the decisions of users which employ such schemes converge to the Nash equilibrium. Finally, we discuss the implications of the study on network design and management.

The literature on the choice and effects of electoral rules in autocracies tends to focus on the dictator’s preferences. However, it is important to recognize that even the most powerful autocrats choose rules under constraints. The constraints may come in the form of opposition actors who threaten the regime or the dictator’s own limited information or knowledge about how the rules work and the distribution of preferences among the electorate. The uncertainty over voter preferences is a particularly acute problem for autocracies where coercion and manipulation are rampant, and the expression of sincere preferences through media and electoral polls is limited. These tactics enable autocrats to win elections but may condition the effects of electoral rules, making the choice of rules difficult. The end result may be that the problem of electoral choice is more difficult for autocrats even if they face fewer formal institutional constraints than their democratic counterparts.