Bjorn Erik Rasch

Portfolio allocation in parliamentary governments

Abstract

The distribution of cabinet seats among coalition partners is puzzling: portfolio allocations tend to be highly proportional, while legislative bargaining models typically predict over-compensation of formateur parties. This paper investigates how variation in the involvement oflegislators in the making and breaking of governments affects the share of portfolios that formateur parties reap. We argue that restrictive rules for government formation and termination increase the prospects of coalition durability and provide formateur parties with weaker incentives to overcompensate coalition partners in exchange for their support. Our results confirm that absolute majority requirements for cabinet formation and removal tend to advantage formateur parties in portfolio allocation. This finding is robust to various coalition characteristics and national settings. The analysis covers 30 countries and doubles the number ofobservations compared to previous studies. Moreover, we improve measurement ofportfolio allocation by basing calculations on the unbiased Sainte-Laglie divisor method.

Bio

Bjørn Erik Rasch is Professor of Political Science at the University of Oslo. His research is currently focused on legislative organization, parliamentarism, and constitutional amendment procedures. He has written or edited thirteen books, of which The Role of Governments in Legislative Agenda Setting (co-edited with Tsebelis, Routledge 2011), Parliaments and Government Formation (co-edited with Cheibub and Martin; Oxford University Press 2015) and Constituent Assemblies (co-edited with Elster, Gargarella and Naresh; Cambridge University Press, May 2018) is the three latest ones. He has published numerous articles in books and journals such as Public Choice, Legislative Studies Quarterly, West European Politics, Journal of Legislative Studies, and European Journal of Political Economy. Bjørn Erik Rasch was member of a Constitutional Commission appointed by the Norwegian Parliament in 2003 to review and modernize the Norwegian Court of Impeachment, and a committee who designed a new electoral system for the Sami Parliament in Northern Norway. He is directing (principal investigator) the research project “The Evolution of Parliamentarism and Its Political Consequences,” funded by the Norwegian Research Council 2013-2018. Bjørn Erik Rasch is member of The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

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Cheibub Jose’ Antonio

The Empirics of Government Formation and Termination in Parliamentary Democracies:
A Dataset of Parliamentary Events.

Abstract

The study of parliamentary democracies is blessed with a multiplicity of datasets containing the most basic information, such as the formation, composition and termination of cabinets. Unfortunately, these datasets are not in agreement regarding these basic facts. The disparities across datasets cast a shadow of uncertainty over the accumulated findings of the large body of empirical research on government formation and termination in parliamentary democracies. The reason for this is, in part, that existing datasets are committed to a specific definition of “government,” which prevents them from accommodating country-specific variation in constitutional rules and practices that is characteristic of parliamentarism. In this paper we introduce a new dataset of parliamentary events covering 34 democracies between 1945 and 2020. In it we record a series of events related to government formation and termination and place them on a timeline for each country. The events for each country vary and the timeline on which they are placed can be partitioned into discrete segments according to the needs of specific  research projects. The dataset is, thus, flexible enough to accommodate the institutional heterogeneity we find in parliamentary democracies. We  illustrate the how the dataset can be used by distinguishing between full power governments and caretaker administrations and periods. We show that the time to form a government has increased in parliamentary democracies since 1945, although it has not been as dramatic as recent formations in specific countries has led many to believe.

Bio

José Antonio Cheibub (Ph.D. University of Chicago) is a Professor of Political Science and the Mary Thomas Marshall Professor in Liberal Arts at Texas A&M University. He joined A&M in 2016 and has previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania (1995-2000), Yale University (2000-2006) and the University of Illinois (2006-2016), where he was the Harold Boeschenstein Professor of Public Policy and Political Economy. His research and teaching interests are in comparative politics, more specifically democratization, the emergence and effects of democratic institutions, and political economy. He has recently co-edited a special issue of Journal of Theoretical Politics revisiting electoral personalism and published papers on electoral strategies in open-list PR systems and the constitutional development of parliamentary democracies.

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Csaba Nikolenyi

Party Switching and Government Stability

Abstract

The presentation discusses ways in which insights the party switching literature can enrich the way we think about and measure government duration and stability. Conventional indicators of government duration and stability tend to focus on changes in the person of the prime minister, the partisan composition and the majority status of the governing coalition. Yet, the burgeoning literature on parliamentary party switching has yielded insights into the important albeit understudied relationship between changes in the partisan affiliation of parliamentarians and government stability. On the one hand, changes in the size and make-up of coalition parties can directly affect not only the overall balance between government and opposition in the legislature but also the balance of powers among the coalition partners. At the same time, party switching within the opposition can also redraw the landscape of the legislative party system by leading to the emergence of the prospective coalition partners whose credible availability to join the government may have repercussion for the stability of the incumbent.

Bio

Csaba Nikolenyi is Professor of Political Science and Director of the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies at Concordia University. His current research focuses on legislative politics in the Knesset and he is completing a book on the history of party switching and Kalanterism. Nikolenyi was former English Co-Editor of the Canadian Journal of Political Science (2006-11); Chair of the Department of Political Science (2011-14); Founding Co-Director and current Director of the Azrieli Institute of Israel Studies. He has published extensively in comparative politics journals and has authored two books: Minority Government in India (Routledge2010) and Institutional Design and Party Government in Post-Communist Democracies (Oxford University Press, 2014) and held Visiting Professor appointments at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2007-8, 2015-6), Science PO Grenoble (2015), the Centre for European Studies at the Australian National University (2012), O.P. Jindal Open Global University in India (2016), and currently at the Martin-Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg (2020).

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Giannetti Daniela

The Impact of Cabinet Reshuffles on Government Survival: Evidence from Five West European Countries (1960-2014)

Abstract

This paper investigates the unexplored link between cabinet reshuffles – understood as personnel related changes within the lifetime of a government – and cabinet survival. While scholars agree that cabinet reshuffles matter in many respects, their impact on cabinet survival is an under-researched topic. Two competing hypotheses can be derived from the literature on delegation. The first one suggests that personnel related changes might increase governments’ longevity as they are effective tools to mitigate agency problems within the cabinet. Focusing on the relationship between ministers and bureaucrats, the second hypothesis contends that reshuffles might negatively affect government duration as they limit governments’ policy-making capacity. We test these hypotheses by using an original dataset on portfolio allocation and cabinet duration in five West European countries (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands) over a relatively long period of time (1960-2014). Our results show that cabinets experiencing a higher rate of reshuffles within their lifetime tend to last less than those experiencing fewer personnel related changes.

Bio

Daniela Giannetti is Full Professor in Political Science at the University of Bologna. Her research interests are in the field of rational choice approach to politics and comparative politics. She is the author of several book chapters and articles published in major international journals. Most recent publications also include “Minority governments in Italy. From Structural Stability to Political Change”, in Shane Martin and Bonnie Field (eds) Minority Goverments in Comparative Perspective, Oxford University Press 2022; “The Entry of the M5S and the Reshaping of Party Politics in Italy (2008-2018)”, Government and Opposition (co-authored with K. Umansky and I. Sened) Sept 2022;  “Italian Politics and Goverment”, Oxford Bibliographies,  Oxford University Press 2023.

Golder Sona

Connecting Parliamentary Party Instability and Government Instability

Abstract

Elected representatives are widely expected to remain affiliated with the political parties that got them elected. However, many democracies experience changes in legislators’ parliamentary party group (PPG) affiliation between elections, leading to changes in the identity and/or size of PPGs. Such party instability in parliaments may have important effects for government stability, particularly if party switching events change a government’s majority status. As part of the research project, “Party Instability in Parliaments (INSTAPARTY)”, we propose a comprehensive typology of party instability events with a focus on three dimensions: (1) the number of MPs and the degree of coordination, (2) the origin of switchers, and (3) the destination of switchers. We further distinguish between switches with single and multiple origins and destinations. Our original dataset of party switching events thus far covers four younger democracies in Central and Eastern Europe (Estonia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania) since the early 2000s and three more established democracies in Western Europe (Ireland, the Netherlands and Norway) since the 1960s, with collection on Italy since the 1990s underway. In this paper, we discuss some theoretical expectations for the determinants and consequences of party switching events, with an emphasis on government stability. We expect that government/opposition status matters for party switching events, because this status can affect legislators’ incentives to leave their original party as well as incentives to try to join another party. We also anticipate that the extent to which these switching events affect government stability depends on the type of switching event.

Bio

Sona N. Golder is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at The Pennsylvania State University and also holds a Professor II position in the Department of Comparative Politics at the University of Bergen for 2022 – 2025. She studies political institutions, with a particular interest in coalition formation. Along with Raimondas Ibenskas (PI, University of Bergen) and Allan Sikk (co-PI, University College London), she is currently working on a project on Party Instability in Parliaments, or INSTAPARTY, that is funded by the Norwegian Research Council. In addition to having served as a co-editor for the British Journal of Political Science, Dr. Golder is an associate editor for Research & Politics and serves on the editorial board for Political Science Research and Methods. She is also a co-editor for a new series, the Oxford Politics of Institutions Series, for Oxford University Press.

Osnat Akirav

Four overlapping crises:
The challenges of the Israeli parliament and its individual members

Abstract

During 2020-2021 Israel faced four overlapping crises: a military crisis, a health crisis, an economic crisis and a constitutional crisis. Since its establishment in 1948, Israel has been facing military threats to its very existence. Similar to other countries, COVID-19 created an economic crisis in Israel. However, during 2019-2022, Israel held elections five times. While in some countries such as the UK, Spain and Austria, citizens went to the polls more frequently than they normally do, they have a constitution, be it formal or informal. In contrast, Israel has only a set of Basic Laws that are easy to change. Did Israeli legislators fulfill their functions of representation and overseeing the government during these four overlapping crises? I argue that the Israeli government and Prime Minister Netanyahu as its head used the COVID-19 crisis to deal with the constitutional crisis in a way that benefited them but deepened the constitutional crisis. Nevertheless, individual legislators, using one-minute speeches, did their best to take a position regarding the constitutional crisis.

Bio

Osnat Akirav is an associate professor in Political Science at the Western Galilee College, Israel. The head of the Galilee research institute at the Western Galilee College. Her specialization is in legislative studies, setting the agenda, candidate selection methods, local government, gender and politics, minorities and politics, research methods and Israeli political system. In 2016 she was a visiting scholar at Stanford university. She has many publications on the representative behavior in local government and in parliaments. She served 10 years as local council representative. In 2010 and in 2015 she received a prize for outstanding teaching in political science from the American Political Science Association and in 2012 she received Edmond Safra award for outstanding achievement and excellence. In 2012 and 2016 she received a prize for best article from the Israeli Political Science Association. In 2015, 2018-2022 she received a prize for excellent researcher from the Western Galilee College. Since 2019 she serves as the vice president of the Israel Political Science Association (ISPSA). And, in 2020 she was nominated to the Western Galilee College president’ advisor for gender fairness.

Sened Itai

Multiparty Democracies in Crisis: Legitimate Enemies and Best Responses – and What Does it all Mean to in the End – A Multi Dimensional Analysis of Government (in) Stability?

Abstract

In the last decades, the foundation of the structure of multiparty democracies, seems shaken by the rise of radical, mostly right leaning, parties. The Independence Party (UKIP) which led the UK to Brexit; Jorg Haider and the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) in Austria, and the success of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) at becoming the third-largest party in Germany, are three notable examples. And then came “Jewish Might” in Israel and the ‘Brothers of Italy’ to lead this phenomenon a step further.

In this paper we discuss the strategies of these parties in their rise to prominence and try to assess the threat they pose to the foundation of Multiparty Democracy as such.

In his Art of Political Manipulation (1986), William H. Riker coined the concept of heresthetics, to engulf the essence of the art of political manipulation. We follow a key claim in Riker’s seminal theory postulating that new parties introduce new dimensions to the political sphere to upset existing political equilibria. We point to an often used, key tool in current political heresthetics that they call the “legitimate” enemy strategy”.  That is, to enter the game or improve their political fortunes, parties name an alleged enemy and link it to current public concerns. The question then becomes, how

threatening is this “legitimate enemy strategy” to the very foundations of multiparty democracies as such?

In the spatial theory of electoral competition (Schoefiled and Sened 2006), parties are perceived by voters as points on ideological axes representing real issues and Voters are assumed to vote to the nearest party available. In this framework, the uncovered set (UCS)(Miller, 1980) measures the set of feasible outcomes in any political arena (Bianco, Jelizkov and Sened, 2004) given the election results, translated into seats in the legislature.  Here, we use this measure to assess the changes in the political landscapes that result from new entry, by new parties who use of the “legitimate” enemy entry strategy, the realignments it causes in the relative positioning of other parties and the threat this realignment poses to the multiparty democracy institutional structures as such.

Bio

Itai Sened received his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1990. After being tenured at Tel Aviv University in 1995, he moved, in 1997, to Washington University in St. Louis. Promoted to Full Professor in 2004, he Chaired the Department of Political Science between 2004-7 and headed, with Douglass C. North, Nobel Laureate of 1993, the Center for New Institutional Social Sciences. He studies comparative institutions, game theory and public policy. After North passed away, he returned to TAU, where he Chaired the Department of Public Policy, founded the School of Social and Policy Studies, the Boris Mints Institute for Strategic Policy Solution to Global Challenges and the International Graduate School of Social Sciences. Since August, 1, 2020, he is the Dean of the Gershon H. Gordon Faculty of Social Sciences at Tel Aviv University.  He is a fellow at the EUI and the Head of the Israeli NMO at IIASA.  He published five books with the top university presses and over 50 articles in reputed refereed journals.

Hansen Martin Ejnar

Serving Dual Masters? Examining Ministerial Termination in Multiple Arenas

Abstract

There are many underexplored themes when it comes to understanding ministerial turnover. One such element is to examine turnover through performance on different arenas. In this paper we examine the impact of public popularity, i.e. the electoral arena, the volume of parliamentary questions handled by a minister, i.e. the legislative arena on ministerial turnover and the impact of cabinet committee membership, i.e. the intra-government arena. We find that all factors have some, albeit with varying levels of significance, influence on early termination of ministers. The less popular a minister is the more likely the prime minister will terminate them early, although when removing non-elected ministers from the analysis this relationship disappears. The more parliamentary questions a minister deals with the less likely it is that they will be terminated early. The impact of cabinet committee membership is in interaction with the questions answered by a minister. We discuss these findings in relation to recent literature and suggest further ways to increase our understanding of ministerial turnover.

Bio

Martin Ejnar Hansen holds a PhD in political science from the University of Aarhus and is currently Reader at Brunel University London. His research is primarily focused on parliaments, governments and political parties. He has published both comparative studies and single-country case studies. The geographical focus of his research is Western Europe and especially the Scandinavian countries.

Hellström Johan

The importance of legislative polarization in the formation and stability of minority governments

Abstract

Why do many minority governments last as long as majority governments? This paper analyses the influence of minority status on cabinet duration under ideologically polarized settings. Theories and research on the longevity of coalition governments in parliamentary systems have long stressed the importance of ideological polarization within the parliament and within the government for cabinet durability. However, it has also been suggested that government formation and duration are simultaneously determined, as party elites incorporate their beliefs about the survival of potential coalitions into their decision-making when bargaining

over the government. An important implication of these theories is that minority cabinets form when there are high levels of ideological polarization in parliament, but up till now the implications of this for minority governments’ survivability have never been addressed in comparative empirical studies.  Using interdependent duration models on a sample of European parliamentary democracies from 1970 until 2019, we examine how ideological polarization over a multidimensional space, within both the parliaments and within governments, affects minority government survival. Our results indicate that one important reason for the fact that minority governments are not in general less durable than majority ones is that they are originally formed in polarized settings, resulting also in a divided opposition unable to join forces and form an alternative government of their own.

Bio

Johan Hellström is a Docent of Political science at Umeå University, Sweden. His research focuses on coalition politics. political parties and democratic representation in Parliamentary democracies. Hellström has published books and articles on mainly comparative European politics and is responsible for the (European) Representative Democracy Data Archive – a data research infrastructure for coalition research ([email protected], ORCID 0000-0002-6613-4242).

Lindahl Jonas

The importance of legislative polarization in the formation and stability of minority governments

Abstract 

Why do many minority governments last as long as majority governments? This paper analyses the influence of minority status on cabinet duration under ideologically polarized settings. Theories and research on the longevity of coalition governments in parliamentary systems have long stressed the importance of ideological polarization within the parliament and within the government for cabinet durability. However, it has also been suggested that government formation and duration are simultaneously determined, as party elites incorporate their beliefs about the survival of potential coalitions into their decision-making when bargaining over the government. An important implication of these theories is that minority cabinets form when there are high levels of ideological polarization in parliament, but up till now the implications of this for minority governments’ survivability have never been addressed in comparative empirical studies.  Using interdependent duration models on a sample of European parliamentary democracies from 1970 until 2019, we examine how ideological polarization over a multidimensional space, within both the parliaments and within governments, affects minority government survival. Our results indicate that one important reason for the fact that minority governments are not in general less durable than majority ones is that they are originally formed in polarized settings, resulting also in a divided opposition unable to join forces and form an alternative government of their own.

Bio

Jonas Lindahl is a PhD candidate at the Department of Political Science, Umeå University, Sweden. His research focuses on coalition politics and party behavior within the context of multidimensional conflict structures in parliamentary democracies. ([email protected], ORCiD: 0000-0002-1071-9129)

Yakter Alon

Collective Identity and ideological dimensions in a protracted conflict over time: Examining Israeli voting patterns in the 21st Century

Abstract

With its combination of free democracy and ethnonational conflict, Israel has long been an intriguing case study for political scientists studying electoral behavior. However, despite multiple changes in Israel and new explanations in the literature, research of Israeli voting patterns has remained stagnant since the early 2000s. Addressing this gap, this article focuses on two questions: do prior explanations of Israeli voting patterns still hold today? And do newer factors add explanatory power to these baseline models? Drawing on election survey data from four decades (1981-2021), we find strong consistency in voting patterns over time. Regardless of various changes, voting decisions are best predicted by attitudes toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and, to a lower extent, by secondary ideological issue-domains and religious and ethnic identities. Furthermore, two newer factors, partisan polarization and personalized affect toward Benjamin Netanyahu, emerge as additional predictors of voting behavior, especially in the past few years. Our findings deepen our understanding of voting patterns in Israel in the early twenty-first century and underscore the stable significance of ethnonational conflicts for electoral alignments over time.

Bio

Dr. Alon Yakter is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the School of Political Science, Government and International Affairs at Tel Aviv University. His research revolves around the dynamics and implications of intergroup relations and attitudes from a comparative perspective, with particular interest in how social cleavages and conflict shape redistributive policies, policy attitudes, voting patterns, and support for conflict resolution. He also studies Israeli political behavior and is a co-investigator in the Israeli National Election Study (INES) and Peace Index survey projects. His work has been published or forthcoming in the British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, European Journal of Political Research, Political Science Research and Methods, Journal of Peace Research, and PS: Political Science & Politics. His work has been funded by the Israeli Science Foundation, Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, University of Michigan’s Center for European Studies, and Tel Aviv University’s Walter Lebach Institute. Dr. Yakter holds a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Michigan.

Tristan Klingelhöfer

Abstract

Bio

Tristan Klingelhöfer is a Lecturer in Political Science and European Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received his PhD from the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 2021. His research interests lie at the intersection of party politics, political communication, and political psychology with a focus on the post-industrial democracies of Western Europe.

Rosenthal Maoz

The Alternating Prime Minister as a Political Institution: Power-Sharing in the Era of Personalisation, Presidentialization and the Erosion of Political Parties

Abstract

The Alternating Prime Minister as a Political Institution: Power-Sharing in the Era of Personalisation, Presidentialization and the Erosion of Political Parties.

Bio

Dr. Maoz Rosenthal has been a senior lecturer at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at Reichman University since 2013. Dr. Rosenthal’s research deals with the way in which political actors strive to achieve their goals in parliamentary democracies in general and with specifically in the Israeli case. His research mainly examines how political elites (prime ministers, members of parliament, high court judges and senior officials) use institutional arrangements, rhetoric and heresthetic(s) to turn their political desires into public policy. Alongside dealing with political elites, Dr. Rosenthal examines how weakened political groups operate in elections based on their social status in order to achieve their goals. In this context, his research examines the political behavior of Arabs in Israel and the electoral behavior of Mizrahim in Israel. Dr. Rosenthal’s research utilizes the rational choice approach (with an emphasis on realistic and pragmatic use of the principles of the approach), and on research methods such as analytical narratives and quantitative research methods. Dr. Rosenthal was a visiting lecturer in a program of Israeli colleagues on behalf of the Schusterman Foundation in the Department of Political Science at SUNY Binghamton University in the United States. He was a visiting researcher at the McMillan Center at Yale University and was the first postdoctoral fellow of the Planning and Budgeting Committee of the Council for Higher Education in Israel in the Department of Sociology, Political Science and Communication at the Open University. Dr. Rosenthal studied all his degrees in the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University under the supervision of the late Professor Gideon Doron.

Yael Shomer

Abstract

Bio

Yael Shomer is a senior lecturer in the School of Political Science, Government and International Affairs, at Tel-Aviv University. Her broad research interests are in comparative politics and democratic institutions, and she specializes in legislative politics, electoral systems, candidate selection processes, parties and party systems and quantitative methodology. Shomer’s research has been published in The American Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Political Behavior, Legislative Studies Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of several grants and fellowships including the Israel Science Foundation grant, and the Marie Curie Reintegration Grant from the European Union.

Amir Freund

National Leadership in Time of A Pandemic

Abstract

In late 2022, China experienced another surge in COVID-19 cases, resulting in a weekly death toll of over 10,000. As world leaders grappled with the challenges of con-taining new COVID variants, we reflect on the first two years of the pandemic, asking whether and how national leaders’ gender impacted democracies’ success in managing the crisis. Our novel research covers 56 democracies and compares the performance of male and female leaders across four pandemic waves, providing unique insights into the dynamics of gendered leadership in the political realm. We identify a growing gender-based performance gap in multiple health indicators. Female leaders were more successful in containing the pandemic, with potential mechanisms including higher lev- els of public trust, greater crisis management effectiveness, and better adaptability to changing circumstances. The research contributes to the literature on gendered leader- ship by providing, for the first time, an analysis of four pandemic waves. Understanding the impact of gender in leadership roles, particularly during global crises, can provide valuable insights for policymakers and national leaders.

Bio

Amir Freund is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at Tel Aviv University. His specialization is in Digital Humanities, and his main research area deals with gender and political leaders. Amir holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Technion and a Master’s degree in Political Science from the School of Political Science at Tel Aviv University.

Sheffer Lior

Differentiating the Sources of Post-Election Partisan Affect Warming

Abstract

While scholars have closely examined the intensi_cation of negative a_ect across party lines during elections, less is known about the decline of partisan hostility in the af- termath of election campaigns. Synthesizing insights from research on electoral rules and political psychology, we theorize and empirically test two such mechanisms of post- election negative a_ect decline. The _rst is that of winners’ generosity: the expectation that self-perceived election winners will express warmer feelings toward political oppo-nents. The second is that of co-governance, which predicts that shared coalition status leads to warmer a_ective evaluations among governing parties. We provide evidence that these mechanisms operate as pressure valves of negative partisan a_ect. The em-pirical analyses leverage a uniquely uncertain political period following the 2021 Israeli elections, around which we conducted an original panel study. Our _ndings advance the comparative polarization literature and connect psychological and institutional ac- counts of temporal uctuations in partisan a_ect.

Bio

Dr. Lior Sheffer studies elite political comportement. His research focuses on executive decision making, exploring if and how people who run for office differ from non-politicians when they solve problems and reason about the policy choices they have to make. He specializes in fielding large scale experiments with incumbent politicians as participants, across different contexts and countries. His broader substantive interests are in elections and campaigns, the role of personality in politics, and legislative comportement. Methodologically, he is interested in survey and field experiments, survey design, and application of psychological modules and insights in the study of politics.

Lior received a B.Sc. in Mathematics and Cognitive Science and an M.A, in Public Policy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He earned his PhD in political science from the University of Toronto. His research has appeared in the American Political Science Review, Electoral Studies, Political Behavior, and Political Research Quarterly, among other journals.

Ram Hardy

How well do different counting methods represent social choice?

Abstract

The question at hand is in the field of electoral systems. In the democratic world, there are dozens of different electoral systems. Scientists have been debating which one is the best. Each electoral system has advantages and disadvantages. Which is the best electoral system that best represents social choice? This research focuses on how votes are being counted. When only two options are up for election, there is a large consensus that majority rule is the right method to express the social choice correctly. When three or more options are present, there’s no unanimity. Some may argue that the Condorcet winner is the most accurate representation of social choice. Some may say that generally, it is true, but there are better methods in specific cases. Some may propose totally different general methods. This research looks at counting methods of ordinal voting ballots to see to what extent they represent social choice by means of math, logic, and computer simulation using six criteria: compatibility with the Condorcet winner, simplicity, non-ambiguity, majority, consistency, and strategicness, to evaluate six counting methods: First Pass the Post, Condorcet, Condorcet’s Maximal Agreement, Bucking, Borda, and Instant Runoff.

Bio

Ram is a software development veteran with 25 years of experience leading developer teams and crafting code. Recently, his passion for politics has taken over, prompting him to pursue a Master’s degree in Political Science. With a multidisciplinary perspective encompassing math, statistics, and logic, he is researching the impact of voting on social choice. Although he now views software development as a hobby, he leverages his computer skills to aid in his political research.