The robust beauty of APA presidential elections: an empty-handed hunt for the social choice conundrum

Alternative Vote;American Psychological Association;behavioral social choice;consensus methods;collective decision making;Hare system;Instant Runoff

Popova, Anna ; Kuklinski, James H. ; Regenwetter ; Michel

关键词: Alternative Vote;    American Psychological Association;    behavioral social choice;    consensus methods;    collective decision making;    Hare system;    Instant Runoff;   

Others  :  https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/34562/Popova_Anna.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

美国|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

Social choice theory in Economics and Political Science has highlighted that competing notions of rational socialchoice are irreconcilable. This established wisdom is based on hypothetical thought experiments, mathematical impossibilitytheorems, and computer simulations. We provide new empirical evidence that challenges the practicality ofthese discouraging predictions. We analyze the ballots from thirteen presidential elections of the American PsychologicalAssociation. We report on an empirical comparison of the Condorcet, the Borda, the Plurality, the Anti-Plurality,the Single Transferable Vote, the Coombs, and the Plurality Runoff rules. We find that these rules frequently agreeboth on the winner and on the social order. Bootstrapping reveals that the coherence among competing rules is aproperty of the empirical distribution of voters’ choices, and it is not specific to a particular sample. Our findings arehighly robust to changes in the modeling assumptions that enter our analysis. These findings suggest many interestingopen research questions for the emerging paradigm of behavioral social choice: Why do competing social choiceprocedures agree in real-world electorates? How broadly does the accumulated evidence against the social choiceconundrum generalize to other electorates and other candidate choice sets?