We construct a network of member states of the United Nations General Assembly based on how similarly they vote on resolutions. We describe a similarity metric that we feel better describes the inter-nation relationships than previously proposed models. Next, we introduce a mechanism to infer the best diplomatic path between countries that do not have high similarity in voting. Lastly, we creat...

This paper attempts to explain cross-national voting behavior in 18 Western democracies over 1960-2003. A new data set for the median voter is introduced that corrects for stochastic error in the statistics from the Comparative Manifesto Project. Next, the paper finds that electoral behavior is closely related to the salience of particular economic institutions. Labour organization, skill speci...

In political science and economics, voting is traditionally conceived as a quasi-rational decision made by self-interested individuals. In these models citizens are seen as weighing the anticipated trouble they must go through in order to cast their votes, against the likelihood that their vote will improve the outcome of an election times the magnitude of that improvement. Of course, these mod...

ÐIn a fault-tolerant distributed system, it is often necessary for nonfaulty processes to agree on the value of a shared data item. The criterion of Approximate Agreement does not require processes to achieve exact agreement on a value; rather, they need only agree to within a predefined numerical tolerance. Approximate Agreement can be achieved through convergent voting algorithms. Previous re...

This paper demonstrates the feasibility and usefulness of survey research asking respondents to report voting probabilities in hypothetical election scenarios. Posing scenarios enriches the data available for studies of voting decisions, as a researcher can pose many more and varied scenarios than the elections that persons actually face. Multiple scenarios were presented to over 4,000 particip...

In a model of simultaneous voting, Feddersen and Pesendorfer (1998) consider the possibility that jurors vote strategically, rather than sincerely reflecting their individual information. This results in counterintuitive result jury is more likely to convict innocent under unanimity rule majority rule. Dekel Piccione (2000) show those unintuitive predictions also hold with sequential voting. th...

Due to the legacy of apartheid segregation South Africa remains a divided society where most voters live in politically homogenous social environments. This paper argues that political discussion within one’s social context plays a primary role in shaping political attitudes and vote choice. Using data from the Comparative National Elections Project 2004 and 2009 South African post-election sur...

This study of the 2000 U.S. presidential election replicates and extends Pillai and Williams‘ [Leadersh. Q. 9 (1998) 397] study of the 1996 presidential election. Data were collected at two periods from respondents across three regions of the United States to yield 342 matched sets of preelection variables and postelection measures. Transformational leadership and attributed charisma were stron...

Political thought and behavior play an important role in our lives, from ethnic tensions in Europe, to the war in Iraq and the Middle Eastern conflict, to parliamentary and presidential elections. However, little is known about how the individual's political attitudes and decisions are shaped by subtle national cues that are so prevalent in our environment. We report a series of experiments tha...

A distributed protocol is presented for anonymous and secure voting that is failure-tolerant with respect to malicious behavior of individual participants and that does not rely on a trusted third party. The proposed voting protocol was designed to be executed on a fixed group of N known participants, each of them casting one vote that may be a vote for abstention. Several attack vectors on the...