Publications by PSE researchers

Page de couverture Les démocraties peinent à répondre à la crise climatique. Une approche prometteuse pour la transition écologique repose sur des innovations impliquant des panels de citoyens tirés au sort. De nombreux pays ont expérimenté cette forme de démocratie délibérative au niveau national et local. Ces assemblées de citoyens formulent des propositions de politiques publiques. La Convention citoyenne pour le climat en France constitue le dispositif le plus important en termes de taille, de durée et de mandat. Grâce à une enquête de terrain multidisciplinaire impliquant une vingtaine de chercheurs, cet ouvrage permet de comprendre la complexité de cette expérience sous plusieurs angles : les procédures et le processus, l’identité et les rôles de ses membres, les rapports à l’expertise et aux représentants, l’évaluation et la comparaison avec d’autres cas. Démocratie délibérative et transition écologique offre une contribution majeure à la réflexion sur une pratique originale d’innovation démocratique et sur son potentiel pour une gouvernance juste des politiques climatiques.

L’article est consacré à l’organisation des scrutins et au comptage des voix dans trois cas de complexité croissante : La répartition des sièges entre pays (exemple du Parlement Européen), la répartition des sièges entre partis politiques, et le choix des projets dans le cas d’un budget participatif. Ces questions techniques mettent en œuvre des concepts fondamentaux de philosophie morale et politique à la manière de la philosophie économique, en particulier les arbitrages entre efficacité et égalité.

L’article est consacré à l’organisation des scrutins et au comptage des voix dans trois cas de complexité croissante : La répartition des sièges entre pays (exemple du Parlement Européen), la répartition des sièges entre partis politiques, et le choix des projets dans le cas d’un budget participatif. Ces questions techniques mettent en œuvre des concepts fondamentaux de philosophie morale et politique à la manière de la philosophie économique, en particulier les arbitrages entre efficacité et égalité.

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).

What drives voters’ decisions to participate in large elections under costly voting, despite the rational expectation that this has no impact on the outcome? We propose a new model of ethical voters, by positing that they have Kantian or semi-Kantian preferences. With such preferences, voters evaluate their behavior in light of what the outcome would be, should a fraction of the other voters choose the same course of action. The “other voters” can be either the entire population (“non-partisan ethics”) or the individuals with same interest (“partisan ethics”). In a model with two candidates and a continuum of voters, we find that turnout is strictly positive as soon as the evaluation by the voters of the political outcome is not strictly of the “winner-take-all” kind. Moreover, the equilibrium turnout rates depend on the specifics of the election at hand, such as the relative stake of the election for the two supporter groups and the presence of core constituent groups.

Many authors argue that candidates are more popular among voters from their own region. Two potential explanations have been suggested: voters’ identification with their home region, and the representation of regional interests. The information on candidates’ residence can be transmitted to voters in different ways, the most easily accessible way being information printed on the ballot paper. However, most studies on “friends and neighbour voting” use aggregate data. Studies that rely on individual level data usually put respondents in hypothetical situations and confront them with synthetic candidates, reducing their realism. To bridge this gap and to test the effect of providing information on the candidates’ residence, we use data from a survey experiment to analyze voters’ responses to ballot paper information on the regional background of real candidates in the 2014 European election in Germany. We find that voters in an open list PR election are more likely to support regional candidates if ballot paper information on the candidates’ geographic background helps them to do so. The appeal of personal ties is a stronger explanation for vote preference than the one based on regional interests.

The kappa-universalization of a symmetric game is the game in which each player considers that any other player chooses with probability kappa the same stategy as she. To any normal form game, we associate the symmetric two-stage game in which, in a first stage, the roles to be played in the base game are randomly assigned. We show that any pure strategy equilibrium of the kappa-universalization of this extended game is an equilibrium of the base game played by altruistic players ("ex ante Homo Moralis equilibrium is altruistic"), and that the converse is false. The paper presents the implications of this remark for the philosophical nature of ethical behavior (Kantianism behind the veil of ignorance implies but is stronger than altruism) and for its evolutionary foundations.

The paper provides a theoretical sports league model to study the pricing of tickets. It considers the trade-off between maximizing match day revenues, through high prices, and maximizing the support of the most demonstrative fans, through low prices. These spectators, the “ultras” contribute to the competitive level of the club along with team-level talent, and therefore indirectly increase the number of victories, hence the revenue from TV rights. We model the role of effusive spectators and show that, in a non-cooperative Nash equilibrium, it may be optimal for the club to subsidize their presence in order to take full advantage of the 12th man effect.

We study the choice of multi-person bargaining protocols in the context of politics. In politics, citizens are increasingly involved in the design of democratic rules, for instance via referendums. If they support the rule that best serves their self-interest, the outcome inevitably advantages the largest group. In this paper, we challenge this pessimistic view with an original lab experiment, in which 252 subjects participated. In the first stage, these subjects experience elections under plurality and approval voting. In the second stage, they decide which rule they want to use for extra elections. We find that egalitarian values that subjects hold outside of the lab shape their choice of electoral rule in the second stage when a rule led to a fairer distribution of payoffs compared to the other one in the first stage. The implication is that people have consistent ‘value-driven preferences’ for decision rules.