Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Voter research'

Voters are getting information from more and more sources. Along with this proliferation of sources has come an increasing distrust of traditional mass media. This has created a challenge for voters who seek reliable information when making decisions in the voting booth; including on ballot initiatives. Because voters tend to find ballot initiatives confusing and not easily informed by traditional party cues, the Citizen’s Initiative Review (CIR) and the non-partisan, fact-based recommendations they produce have now spread into multiple states. My thesis seeks to gauge whether the CIR is effective at achieving the goals of increasing voter knowledge and encouraging thoughtful voting decisions; two challenges posed by ballot initiatives. I evaluate the available literature on how voters make decisions in general and about ballot initiatives specifically and then review data from five studies conducted in states with a CIR to determine whether the CIR has met these goals. Where other reports have evaluated findings from individual studies or states, my report takes a comprehensive view of the available data and compares it to what traditional political science literature has to say about voter behavior related to ballot initiatives. On balance, I find that voters see the CIR as providing useful and informative recommendations that have legitimate positive impacts on how they deliberate and vote on ballot initiatives.

The study begins with a careful investigation of all parties in Belgium, The Netherlands and Germany by means of both qualitative and quantitative methods to explore which of them could be labelled populist. Support was found for at least the following cases: LPF, the Belgian Lijst Dedecker (LDD), the Dutch Partij Voor de Vrijheid (PVV), VB, the Dutch Socialistische Partij (SP) and DL. In a next step, the voters of these parties were analyzed by means of election survey data (Dutch Parliamentary Election Study, Partirep Survey and German Longitudinal Election Study).

The main finding of is that dissatisfaction with the functioning of democracy and a desire for more decision making through referendums are important and unique drivers for populist voting in general. On the demand side it is argued that a process of cartelization, i.e. increased reliance of parties on state subventions, more cooperation between government and opposition, and ideological moderation, combined with the growth of critical citizens has led to the questioning of political authority. On the supply side, an increasing group of well-organized populist parties have begun challenging mainstream parties by depicting them as a group of self-serving elites depriving the ordinary people of their sovereignty. Moreover, populist parties claim to restore the voice of the people through the introduction of direct democracy. Accordingly, a growing group of voters who share these concerns are attracted to the populist appeal.

Another important finding of this study is that populist parties generally attract social groups that feel themselves deprived. In Eastern Germany of the 1990s these were the ‘losers of unification’, i.e. highly educated civil servants who had lost the social prestige that they enjoyed during the heydays of the DDR. Yet in contemporary ‘diploma democracies’ it appears that populist parties, regardless of their host ideology, are increasingly attracting the ‘losers of globalization’, which are the lower educated and lower social classes. While populism has mostly been considered a threat for democracy, the ability of populist parties to integrate excluded social groups into the political system certainly deserves notice.
Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

(i) One Person, Many Votes: Divided Majority and Information Aggregation (joint with Micael Castanheira)

In elections, majority divisions pave the way to focal manipulations and coordination failures, which can lead to the victory of the wrong candidate. This paper shows how this flaw can be addressed if voter preferences over candidates are sensitive to information. We consider two potential sources of divisions: majority voters may have similar preferences but opposite information about the candidates, or opposite preferences. We show that when information is the source of majority divisions, Approval Voting features a unique equilibrium with full information and coordination equivalence. That is, it produces the same outcome as if both information and coordination problems could be resolved. Other electoral systems, such as Plurality and Two-Round elections, do not satisfy this equivalence. The second source of division is opposite preferences. Whenever the fraction of voters with such preferences is not too large, Approval Voting still satisfies full information and coordination equivalence.

(ii) Runoff Elections and the Condorcet Loser

A crucial component of Runoff electoral systems is the threshold fraction of votes above which a candidate wins outright in the first round. I analyze the influence of this threshold on the voting equilibria in three-candidate Runoff elections. I demonstrate the existence of an Ortega Effect which may unduly favor dominated candidates and thus lead to the election of the Condorcet Loser in equilibrium. The reason is that, contrarily to commonly held beliefs, lowering the threshold for first-round victory may actually induce voters to express their preferences excessively. I also extend Duverger's Law to Runoff elections with any threshold below, equal or above 50%. Therefore, Runoff elections are plagued with inferior equilibria that induce either too high or too low expression of preferences.

(iii) On the Influence of Rankings when Product Quality Depends on Buyer Characteristics

Information on product quality is crucial for buyers to make sound choices. For "experience products", this information is not available at the time of the purchase: it is only acquired through consumption. For much experience products, there exist institutions that provide buyers with information about quality. It is commonly believed that such institutions help consumers to make better choices and are thus welfare improving.

The quality of various experience products depends on the characteristics of buyers. For instance, conversely to the quality of cars, business school quality depends on buyers (i.e. students) characteristics. Indeed, one of the main inputs of a business school is enrolled students. The choice of buyers for such products has then some features of a coordination problem: ceteris paribus, a buyer prefers to buy a product consumed by buyers with "good" characteristics. This coordination dimension leads to inefficiencies when buyers coordinate on products of lower "intrinsic" quality. When the quality of products depends on buyer characteristics, information about product quality can reinforce such a coordination problem. Indeed, even though information of high quality need not mean high intrinsic quality, rational buyers pay attention to this information because they prefer high quality products, no matter the reason of the high quality. Information about product quality may then induce buyers to coordinate on products of low intrinsic quality.

In this paper, I show that, for experience products which quality depends on the characteristics of buyers, more information is not necessarily better. More precisely, I prove that more information about product quality may lead to a Pareto deterioration, i.e. all buyers may be worse off due.

(iv) Redistributing Income under Fiscal Vertical Imbalance (joint with Marjorie Gassner and Vincenzo Verardi)

From the literature on decentralization, it appears that the fiscal vertical imbalance (i.e. the dependence of subnational governments on national government revenues to support their expenditures) is somehow inherent to multi-level governments. Using a stylized model we show that this leads to a reduction of the extent of redistributive fiscal policies if the maximal size of government has been reached. To test for this empirically, we use some high quality data from the LIS dataset on individual incomes. The results are highly significant and point in the direction of our theoretical predictions.

Doctorat en Sciences économiques et de gestion
info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished