Proportional representation (PR) is a fundamental principle of many democracies world-wide which employ PR-based voting rules to elect their representatives. Œe normative properties of these voting rules however, are o‰en only understood in the context of sincere voting. In this paper we consider PR in the presence of strategic voters. We construct a voting rule such that for every preference p...

The presumption in the theoretical literature on ethnic mobilization is that voting for ethnic parties is a purely expressive act, not subject to cost-benefit calculations. Models of strategic voting, meanwhile, typically make no reference to the ethnic identity of voters and parties. This article challenges the presumption that voting for ethnic parties is primarily an expressive act. It devel...

We study voting games on binary issues, where voters hold an objective over the outcome of the collective decision and are allowed, before the vote takes place, to negotiate their voting strategy with the other participants. We analyse the voters’ rational behaviour in the resulting two-phase game, showing under what conditions undesirable equilibria can be removed and desirable ones sustained ...

The literature on legislative voting either explicitly excludes free votes from its analysis, does not distinguish them other recorded votes, or analyses only topic-specific subsets of them. This research note shows all three approaches to be problematic, and argues for a reconsideration how are approached in the literature. Drawing dataset covering German Bundestag (1949–2021), analysing topic...

The probability that an individual is decisive in an election is an important criterion for the evaluation of voting rules. It depends on factors such as the number and the behaviour of the other voters, the available alternatives and, of course, also on the voting rule itself. Classical power indices like the Banzhafor the Shapley-Shubik-Index are only applicable in special cases. In this pape...

OBJECTIVES To examine the relationship between cervical screening uptake and political engagement, and to test whether political engagement and voting behaviour mediate the association between age and cervical screening uptake. SETTING A population-based survey of women in England in 2010. METHODS Women aged 26-64 took part in home-based computer-assisted interviews (n = 890). Women were cl...

Online votes or ratings can assist internet users in evaluating the credibility and appeal of the information which they encounter. For example, aggregator websites such as Reddit allow users to up-vote submitted content to make it more prominent, and down-vote content to make it less prominent. Here we argue that decisions over what to up- or down-vote may be guided by evolved features of huma...