We report on two field experiments on Approval Voting conducted during actual state and federal elections in Germany. Voters provided approval ballots both for named district candidates and for state parties. The data reveal significant discrepancies in the outcomes under the official method and Approval Voting. Further, our analysis suggests that currently used voting methods do a poor job of representing the electorate's preferences. As a consequence, some recurring features of the political landscape in a given country might be, in part, an artifice of the employed voting method.
This paper reports on the results of a series of experimental laboratory elections. The novelty of the design allows me to study the extent to which voting methods defeat the Condorcet loser and elect the Condorcet winner in a repeated-game, divided majority setting. I assess and compare the performance of three voting mechanisms, Approval Voting, Borda Count, and Plurality Voting under two information structures. Voters either know the preference structure in the electorate or hold no information regarding other voters' preferences. With enough experience, the number of elections won by the Condorcet loser is fairly low across voting methods and information structures. Approval Voting and Borda Count dissolve information imperfections eciently and allow voters to implement the Condorcet winner, independently of the underlying information structure. The frequency with which the Condorcet winner is elected under Plurality Voting crucially depends on available information. When voters are uninformed about the preference structure in the electorate, Plurality Voting fails to implement the Condorcet winner. This is costly and decreases total welfare.
The 2008 state elections in the German state of Hesse were expected to be extremely close. However, nobody expected that forming a new government would reveal itself to be impossible and, after long months of unsuccessful attempts, new elections would have to be called for almost exactly 1 year later. On the original election day, January 21st 2008, we carried out a field experiment on approval voting in the German town of Messel, with the explicit permission and friendly support of the Hessian Ministry for the Interior and for Sport, the head election organizer (Mr. Wolfgang Hannappel), the mayor of the Messel district (Mr. Udo Henke), and the election commissioner (Mr. Dieter Lehr). This collaboration allowed us to install separate voting booths in each of the three different voting areas in the Messel district. Voters had been previously contacted per post and asked to take part in a secondary hypothetical vote after casting their official vote. In this second vote, Approval Voting was offered as an alternative voting system. Our motivation was twofold. First, we were inspired by the experiment of Laslier and Van der Straeten (2004, 2008) 1 in the French Presidential Elections of 2002 and wanted to conduct an analogous study in Germany. We believe that conducting such field experiments in different countries is crucial to establish the practical applicability of the method. 2 Second, the particularities of the German electoral system allowed us to conduct two simultaneous experiments with the same voters, one where Approval Voting was used to select a candidate under a winner-take-all procedure (as in previous experiments elsewhere), and one where votes were cast 1 See also Laslier (2006). 2 The bottom-line motivation, as in Laslier and Van der Straeten (2004, 2008) or Brams and Fishburn (2005), is to show that Approval Voting could readily be incorporated into the political process. The desirability of such a development is founded on the method's sound theoretical properties, as shown by Brams and Fishburn (1978) and made explicit by the characterization results of Fishburn (1978a, 1978b) and Alós-Ferrer (2006).
This paper reports on the results of a series of experimental laboratory elections. The novelty of the design allows me to study the extent to which voting methods defeat the Condorcet loser and elect the Condorcet winner in a repeated-game, divided majority setting. I assess and compare the performance of three voting mechanisms, Approval Voting, Borda Count, and Plurality Voting under two information structures. Voters either know the preference structure in the electorate or hold no information regarding other voters' preferences. With enough experience, the number of elections won by the Condorcet loser is fairly low across voting methods and information structures. Approval Voting and Borda Count dissolve information imperfections eciently and allow voters to implement the Condorcet winner, independently of the underlying information structure. The frequency with which the Condorcet winner is elected under Plurality Voting crucially depends on available information. When voters are uninformed about the preference structure in the electorate, Plurality Voting fails to implement the Condorcet winner. This is costly and decreases total welfare.
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