voting

Not a Ranked-Choice Failure

Zachary Bartsch3 Comments

I have a good friend who is a professor in philosophy at another university. He was telling me about the struggle among his colleagues to determine the recipient of their annual department award. Every year the department chooses from among the graduating philosophy major students one to recognize for excellence. This year, they faced the challenge of incommensurables.

One student had a high GPA in the major, but had a severe case of senioritis and had phoned-in her senior courses. A second had a slightly worse GPA, but had face-planted the senior thesis. Still a 3rd student had merely a good GPA, but wrote an excellent publishable thesis.

The philosophy faculty could not agree. They each shared stories and arguments about the relative weights of the performance indicators and the relative value of the performances. I don’t know if you know any academics, but suffice it to say that they both A) tend not to be good administrators and B) tend not to be invited to productive meetings. I’m glad that I wasn’t in the room.

In fact, the faculty met twice! They were at an impasse. The department award winner is usually no contest. The person who excels in one area tends to also excel in the others. This year, the decision was so unclear and the faculty were so divided that they even seriously considered withholding the award entirely. None of the candidates was excellent on all counts.

Finally, trying to come to a decision – if not an agreement – they decided to adopt something that they’d heard good things about: Ranked Choice Voting. I was thrilled to hear this. What an opportunity to exhibit the nuance and beauty of this collective choice method! They agreed to adopt whatever the outcome would be. As my friend told me this, I was giddy with anticipation. What an exciting story! More good experiences with ranked choice voting may improve its popularity and make widespread its adoption.

If you don’t know, Ranked Choice Voting involves everyone ranking the candidates in order of preference. In this case 1 is most preferred and 3 is least preferred. Then, the candidate with the fewest first-ranked votes is eliminated from the running. The voters whose first preference was nixed now have their votes reallocated to their 2nd preferred candidates. Since only two candidates remain, one of them has won the majority and the election ends with an outcome that is usually considered better than the simple ‘just choose your favorite’ version that most of us use at our local polls.

How did the philosophers fare?

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Are Special Elections Special?

Jeremy HorpedahlLeave a comment

While the United States does have its problems with democracy, one area where we shine is direct democracy. Rare at the federal level, at the state and local level direct democracy is quite common in the US, much more so than most other democracies (Switzerland also stands out). Almost half the states have some form of citizen initiative or referendum process, and it is used frequently in most of those states. But even more direct democracy takes place at the local level.

And much of that direct democracy at the local level takes place through what are called special elections. I’m not talking about elections to fill unexpected vacancies in office — though of course those do happen. I’m talking about actual voting on issues. Many of these issues revolve around questions of public finance: whether to raise a local sales tax, to approve a property tax millage, or to issue bonds for a capital project.

One very relevant example for me is an upcoming special election in my city of Conway, Arkansas. Citizens are being asked to approve the issuing of bonds to construct a community center, pool, soccer fields, and some other amenities. The bonds would be secured by a tax on restaurants. The tax already exists — city councils can put these in place without a public vote. But to issue bonds, the citizens must be asked. I wrote an op-ed about it in my local paper (if that is gated, try this blog post).

The key is that this is a special election. There are no other issues on the ballot. It takes place on February 8th, not a date that probably stands out in voters minds as an election date. What will this special election mean for voter turnout? A lot of academic research, including a paper that I wrote (currently under review, but summarized here), finds clear evidence that voter turnout will be much lower. Will the result be different? Again, a lot of evidence suggests yes. For example, property tax elections in Louisiana were less likely to pass with higher turnout, and less likely to pass in a general election (my research finds a similar result for sales tax elections in Arkansas).

But why are tax increases less likely to pass in special elections? On this question there are many theories, but they are hard to test. Is it because different kinds of voters show up at special elections, representing a different sample of the population? Possibly, but evidence is hard to find.

A new paper just published in the American Political Science Review sheds some light on these questions.

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Preferences for Equality and Efficiency

Joy Buchanan1 Comment

Most people would consider both equality and efficiency to be good. They are “goods” in the sense that more of them makes us happier.  However, in some situations, there is a trade-off between having more equality and getting more efficiency. Extreme income redistribution makes people less productive and therefore lowers overall economic output.

Examining the preferences people have for efficiency and equality is hard to do because the world is complicated. For example, a lot of baggage comes along with real world policy proposals to raise(lower) taxes to do more(less) income redistribution. A voter’s preference for a particular policy could be confounded by their personal feelings toward a particular politician who might have just had a personal scandal.

With Gavin Roberts, I ran an experiment to test whether people would rather get efficiency or equality (paper on SSRN). Something neat that we can do in a controlled lab setting is systematically vary the prices of the goods (see my earlier related post on why it’s neat to do this kind of thing in the lab).

One wants to immediately know, “Which is it? Do people want equality or efficiency?”. If forced to give a short answer, I would say that the evidence points to equality. But overly simplifying the answer is not helpful for making policy. The demand curve for equality slopes down. If the price of equality is too high, then people will not choose it. In our experiment, that price could be in terms of either own income or in group efficiency. We titled our paper “Other People’s Money” because more equality is purchased when the cost comes in terms of other players’ money.

The main task for subjects in our experiment is to choose either an unequal distribution of income between 3 players or to pick a more equal distribution. Given what I said above that people like equality, you might expect that everyone will choose the more equal distribution. However, choosing a more equal distribution comes at a cost. Either subjects will give up some of their own earnings from the experiment or they will lower the total group earnings. As is true in policy, some schemes to reduce inequality are higher cost than others. When the cost is low, we observe many subjects (about half) paying to get more equality. However, when the cost is high, very few subjects choose to buy equality.

This bar graph from our working paper shows some of the average behavior in the experiment, but it does not show the important results about price-sensitivity.

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