The robust beauty of APA presidential elections: an empty-handed hunt for the social choice conundrum
Popova, Anna
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/34562
Description
Title
The robust beauty of APA presidential elections: an empty-handed hunt for the social choice conundrum
Author(s)
Popova, Anna
Issue Date
2012-09-18T21:25:40Z
Director of Research (if dissertation) or Advisor (if thesis)
Regenwetter, Michel
Committee Member(s)
Kuklinski, James H.
Department of Study
Psychology
Discipline
Psychology
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
M.A.
Degree Level
Thesis
Keyword(s)
Alternative Vote
American Psychological Association
behavioral social choice
consensus methods
collective decision making
Hare system
Instant Runoff
Abstract
Social choice theory in Economics and Political Science has highlighted that competing notions of rational social
choice are irreconcilable. This established wisdom is based on hypothetical thought experiments, mathematical impossibility
theorems, and computer simulations. We provide new empirical evidence that challenges the practicality of
these discouraging predictions. We analyze the ballots from thirteen presidential elections of the American Psychological
Association. We report on an empirical comparison of the Condorcet, the Borda, the Plurality, the Anti-Plurality,
the Single Transferable Vote, the Coombs, and the Plurality Runoff rules. We find that these rules frequently agree
both on the winner and on the social order. Bootstrapping reveals that the coherence among competing rules is a
property of the empirical distribution of voters’ choices, and it is not specific to a particular sample. Our findings are
highly robust to changes in the modeling assumptions that enter our analysis. These findings suggest many interesting
open research questions for the emerging paradigm of behavioral social choice: Why do competing social choice
procedures agree in real-world electorates? How broadly does the accumulated evidence against the social choice
conundrum generalize to other electorates and other candidate choice sets?
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