158 research outputs found
Supplemental Material, mcn14sm - Tests of whether candidate A or B would fare better against C—and other polling enrichments to open up party strategy
No full textSupplemental Material, mcn14sm for Tests of whether candidate A or B would fare better against C—and other polling enrichments to open up party strategy by Richard F Potthoff in Party Politics</p
The National Popular Vote proposal is doomed if even only one state rejects plurality voting for president
No full textThe Electoral College system used to elect US presidents can sometimes lead to the candidate with the most electoral votes gaining the White House without the support of a plurality of those who voted. Richard F. Potthoff looks critically at a proposed alternative way of electing the US president, the National Popular Vote plan, where all states in an interstate compact which cover 270 or more electoral votes would cast their electoral votes for the candidate who won the nationwide vote, no matter who wins their state. He writes that despite its advantages over the Electoral College, the National Popular vote plan breaks down if one state uses a different voting system from plurality voting – as Maine does, and Alaska will soon do
Condorcet Completion Methods that Inhibit Manipulation through Exploiting Knowledge of Electorate Preferences
No full textThis paper attacks a problem like the one addressed in an earlier work (Potthoff, 2013) but is more mathematical. The setting is one where an election is to choose a single winner from m (> 2) candidates, it is postulated that voters have knowledge of the preference profile of the electorate, and preference cycles are limited. Both papers devise voting systems whose two key goals are to select a Condorcet winner (if one exists) and to resist manipulation. These systems entail equilibrium strategies where everyone votes sincerely, no group of voters sharing the same preference ordering can gain by deviating given that no one else deviates, and the Condorcet candidate wins. The present paper uses two unusual ballot types. One asks voters to rank the candidates with respect both to their own preferences and to their discerned order of preference of the entire electorate. The other just asks voters for their own preference ranks plus approval votes. Novel mathematical elements distinguish this paper. Its Condorcet completion methods examine all candidate triples, sometimes analyze loop(s) of some of those triples, and order candidates in a set by first determining the last-place candidate. Its non-manipulability proofs involve mathematical induction on m
Flexible frames and control sampling in case-control studies\ud
No full textWe propose two innovations in statistical sampling for controls to enable better design of population-based case-control studies. The main innovation leads to novel solutions, without using weights, of the difficult and long-standing problem of selecting a control from persons in a household. Another advance concerns the drawing (at the outset) of the households themselves and involves random-digit dialing with atypical use of list-assisted sampling. A common element throughout is that one capitalizes on flexibility (not broadly available in usual survey settings) in choosing the frame, which specifies the population of persons from which both cases and controls come.\u
Estimating Ideal Points from Roll-Call Data: Explore Principal Components Analysis, Especially for More Than One Dimension?
No full textFor two or more dimensions, the two main approaches to estimating legislators’ ideal points from roll-call data entail arbitrary, yet consequential, identification and modeling assumptions that bring about both indeterminateness and undue constraints for the ideal points. This paper presents a simple and fast approach to estimating ideal points in multiple dimensions that is not marred by those issues. The leading approach at present is that of Poole and Rosenthal. Also prominent currently is one that uses Bayesian techniques. However, in more than one dimension, they both have several problems, of which nonidentifiability of ideal points is the most precarious. The approach that we offer uses a particular mode of principal components analysis to estimate ideal points. It applies logistic regression to estimate roll-call parameters. It has a special feature that provides some guidance for deciding how many dimensions to use. Although its relative simplicity makes it useful even in just one dimension, its main advantages are for more than one
Radial Symmetry Does Not Preclude Condorcet Cycles If Different Voters Weight the Issues Differently
No full textRadial symmetry, by our definition, is a precise condition on continuous ideal-point distributions, rarely if ever found exactly in practice, that is similar to the classical 1967 symmetry condition of Plott but pertains to an infinite electorate; the bivariate normal distribution provides an example. A Condorcet cycle exists if the electorate prefers alternative X to Y, Y to Z, and Z to X. An alternative K is a Condorcet winner if there is no alternative that the electorate prefers to K. Lack of a Condorcet winner may engender turmoil. The nonexistence of a Condorcet winner implies that a Condorcet cycle exists. Radial symmetry precludes the existence of Condorcet cycles and thus guarantees a Condorcet winner; but this result assumes that all voters weight the dimensions alike. Our counterexamples show that a Condorcet cycle can arise, even under radial symmetry, if the weighting of issues varies across voters. This finding may be of more than theoretical value: It may suggest that in an empirical setting (without radial symmetry), a Condorcet cycle may be more frequent if voters differ as to how they weight the dimensions. We examine, for illustration based on two dimensions (left–right, linguistic), a Condorcet preference cycle in Finland’s 1931 presidential election
Three Bizarre Presidential-Election Scenarios: The Perils of Simplism
No full textThe 1968, 2000, and (future) 2024 U.S. presidential elections provide settings for deliberately provocative, offbeat scenarios that might have happened or could happen. Throughout, the Electoral College and plurality voting both receive blame. Scenario 1 exposes a quirk previously unnoticed: Under (albeit special) conditions, certain 1968 Humphrey voters could have made Humphrey rather than Nixon the election victor had they voted strategically for Wallace instead of Humphrey. In Scenario 2, overlooked nonidentifiability of undervotes would have plagued the 2000 Florida recount had the U.S. Supreme Court not halted it, thus raising questions about the foresightfulness of almost everyone involved; but, in addition, Gore missed an opportunity that, through use of proper statistical sampling, could have propelled him to victory. In Scenario 3, National Popular Vote Interstate Compact supporters fail to foresee that even one state, by changing its method for presidential voting, can wreck this innovative and widely promoted compact
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