Publications des chercheurs de PSE

In several cantons in Switzerland the regional government, i.e. a set of governors who share the executive power in the canton, is elected according to an original voting rule, in which voters can vote for several candidates (up to a maximal number of votes). Up to some details, these elections are instances of what is known in Social Choice Theory as “Committee Approval Voting”. The paper makes use of data from a panel survey collected during the 2011 Zurich cantonal election to check whether a strategic voting theory is consistent with individual behaviour observed during that election. We show that roughly 70% of the individual decisions on candidates are consistent with our model of rational voting.

Declining levels of turnout and growing distrust in political elites are often seen as symptoms of a crisis of representative democracy. Various proposals of reform have been made to reinvigorate representation and political participation. This paper focuses on one aspect of that debate: finding an alternative to FPTP, which is the electoral rule most frequently used in single-member districts, but which is criticized, among others, for allowing only a limited expression of voters' preferences. Many alternative rules are in use or have been suggested, such as Two-Round majority, Instant Runoff, Approval Voting, Majority Judgement, or Range Voting. The literature on these decision rules has concentrated on their formal properties. Yet, we know surprisingly little about how frequently these rules would lead to different outcomes in normal electoral settings. This paper improves our understanding of these rules by examining their mechanical effects. We start from data on voters' party utilities from “real-world” settings, based on CSES data. This allows simulating and comparing the outcomes of different electoral rules under a variety of distributions of voters' party preferences. We then analyze how frequently they lead to different outcomes and identify the contextual characteristics that explain these differences. For the latter question, we focus on a number of party system or electorate's characteristics, which have been highlighted in debates on challenges to representation (such as ideological polarization, party system fragmentation, or affective polarization).