Economics serving society

November 2016 - VoteFoot.org: choose the best football player of 2016… and advance social science research!

What if you could vote for the best football player of the year while participating in a scientific study? That is what the votefoot.org site is currently offering, in a study being conducted by researchers interested both in football as a “total social fact”, including the practices and culture of supporters, and in voting systems. The site is presented in six languages and is open to all, until 13 December 2016. The data are collected and treated in the strictest confidence, and the first results will be announced soon after the study closes.

How to participate?

This two-part on-line study can be accessed on a computer, tablet or smartphone, and takes between ten and twenty minutes to complete.
The first part consists of voting for the best footballer of the year from the list of the 30 finalists of the Ballon d’Or 2016 (France Football). You are invited to make your choice via three types of voting systems:

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  • First past the post”, in which you vote for just one candidate. The one who receives the most votes is elected. This simple system is used in political elections in England, the United States and India, for example.
  • Positional voting”, wherein voters must choose three candidates and attribute five points to their first choice, three points to the second choice and one point to the third. The candidate who receives the most points is elected. This is the system used for the official Ballon d’Or selection.
  • Approval voting”, whereby voters give a tick to all candidates of which they approve. The candidate with the greatest number of approvals is elected. The voter is not limited in the number of candidates she can approve of. This is a novel system which currently is not often in use: the researchers thus hope to experiment with it through this website. In the second part of the study, the online participants answer about 30 questions on their football preferences and practices, but also on a variety of subjects such as, for example, their conception of fair play.

Details about the data collected

This international study is open and voluntary, and all responses will be treated in the strictest confidence. The data collected will be used only to scientific ends, which are neither commercial nor political. Participants are not obliged to answer questions that they do not want to answer, and no data that would permit the identification of the user will be stored. For all questions about protocols, anonymity, and the like, the researchers can be contacted directly on contact at votefoot.org

The research team and partner institutions

The principal researchers in charge of this project are Luc Arrondel (CNRS/PSE), André Blais (Uni. Montréal), Jean-François Laslier (CNRS/PSE), Chris Anderson (Cornell Uni.), David F. Sally (Darmouth College), Karine Van der Straeten (CNRS/TSE) and Markus Brill (TU Berlin); they are also supported by a global network of correspondents. The institutional partners in the project are the following:

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Media liaison: Sylvain Riffé Stern, PSE - sylvain.riffe at psemail.eu, 01 43 13 63 54