As you may know, I have an interest in elections and voting, and follow the literature more than casually. I’m delighted to pass on this excellent paper, On Voting Systems, by Archdruid Eileen of the Beaker Folk of Husborne Crawley.
It’s a brief paper, but contains a fairly comprehensive review of portal, hydraulic and feline balloting [...]
Matthew Yglesias makes the case that we (in the US) vote too much. Heretical, of course, but it has the ring of common sense.
For Less Voting
Ezra Klein saw the same Larry Lessig presentation I was at yesterday. His take is more skeptical than I would be about the pernicious influence of money in politics. [...]
Glenn Greenwald, thoughtful as always.
What the Supreme Court got right
The Supreme Court yesterday, in a 5-4 decision, declared unconstitutional (on First Amendment grounds) campaign finance regulations which restrict the ability of corporations and unions to use funds from their general treasury for “electioneering” purposes. The case, Citizens United v. FEC, presents some very difficult free speech questions, and [...]
Via TPM. Puts Steve Jobs’s reality distortion field to shame.
Poll: Majority Of Republicans Think Obama Didn’t Actually Win 2008 Election — ACORN Stole It!
The new national poll from Public Policy Polling (D) has an astonishing number about paranoia among the GOP base: Republicans do not think President Obama actually won the 2008 election — instead, [...]
The Condorcet voting paradox, in voting theory, says that it’s possible to have (for example) three candidates A, S & V such that the voters collectively prefer A to S, S to V and V to A. It sounds impossible, but that’s why it’s called a paradox.
There seems to be something like that for cellphone [...]
Two studies of the rationality of human behavior (ScienceDaily):
Clean Smells Promote Moral Behavior, Study Suggests
People are unconsciously fairer and more generous when they are in clean-smelling environments, according to a soon-to-be published study led by a Brigham Young University professor.
The research found a dramatic improvement in ethical behavior with just a few spritzes of citrus-scented [...]
This one’s a bit on the wonky side. Via John Sides we have a newish paper, The Rising Incumbent Reelection Rate: What’s Gerrymandering Got to Do With It?.
The answer in brief: less than nothing.
Some background. The reelection rate of Congressional incumbents has always been high, but over time it has gotten higher, as shown [...]
I ran across two rather different takes on the proportionality of the results of Germany’s recent election.
First we have Matthew Søberg Shugart at Fruits and Votes:
The German result
Perusing the results of last Sunday’s German election (thank you, Adam Carr), one thing that jumps out at me is the high—by standards of Germany’s proportional system—disproportionality. …
While [...]
John Stuart Mill was an early and strong advocate of universal suffrage, at a time when it was taken for granted that women, for example, did not vote. In Considerations on Representative Government, published in 1861, when the modern suffrage movement was just getting started, he wrote:
…it is a personal injustice to withhold from any [...]
It’s not quite at the top of my list of democratic reforms, but congressional districts (and for that matter many state legislative districts, notably California’s) are too big. This leads to very expensive campaigns, which in turn favor the big donors who can fund them. More districts would be better for proportional representation, too, which [...]
About a week ago, Nate Silver posted an interesting piece on Arlen Specter’s recent voting behavior. Here’s the most interesting graph:
The key events on the timeline were the Quinnipiac poll, which shows Specter losing badly to a right-wing Republican challenger, Specter’s subsequent switch to the Democratic Party, and finally the prospect of a primary challenge [...]
Ezra Klein continues his Health Care Reform for Beginners series this week with Health Care Reform for Beginners: The Many Flavors of the Public Plan and Health Reform for Beginners: The Difference Between Socialized Medicine, Single-Payer Health Care, and What We’ll Be Getting.
You’ll want to read them both, but here I want to focus on [...]
This nice quote from Milton Friedman (in the context of overhauling the Federal Reserve, as it happens) was recently quoted in the context of health care reform, specifically in support of considering single-payer systems. I’d add democratic reforms such as proportional representation to the list.
… it is worth discussing radical changes, not in the expectation [...]
OK, this can hardly be surprising. But still…
Matthew Yglesias: Public Deeply Ignorant About Cap and Trade
Via Dave Weigel, an unusually useful poll from Rasmussen Reports:
Via Mark Thoma. Lots more, mainly on spurious data mining.
Rats Outperform Humans in Interpreting Data
Laboratory experiments show that rats outperform humans in interpreting data… The amazing finding on rats is described in an equally amazing book by Leonard Mlodinow. The experiment consists of drawing green and red balls at random, with the probabilities rigged so [...]
A little more than two years ago, I published a review in Voting matters of the Second Report of the Irish Commission on Electronic Voting.
The government of Ireland chose an electronic voting system for use beginning with the local and European Parliamentary elections of 11 June 2004. Responding to public criticism, the government established the [...]
Self-described election junkie Nate Silver (FiveThirtyEight) has a piece in the NY TImes today bemoaning the failure of the US electoral system to produce competitive elections except as a rare exception.
Sadly, his solution is pretty lame:
The good news for fans of competitive elections is that some of these factors could conceivably be changed through acts [...]
This has been floating around for a while, and I’ve been meaning to mention it. So here goes.
Science Literacy — American Adults ‘Flunk’ Basic Science, Says Survey
Only 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.
Only 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not [...]
Another in a series of reasons we should think twice before entrusting our decisions to … people.
Abstract
Low processing fluency fosters the impression that a stimulus is unfamiliar, which in turn results in perceptions of higher risk, independent of whether the risk is desirable or undesirable. In Studies 1 and 2, ostensible food additives were rated [...]
Actually, this story has nothing to do with voting, at least not directly. But elections have been on our minds recently, and my first reaction was: these are the people who are electing our leaders.
A group of French researchers report the results of a survey. The premise is trivially simple:
In this paper, we analyze the [...]