Zoom links for Political Economy Seminar are distributed via the seminar's mailing list. You can sign up for the list using this link: https://lists.iq.harvard.edu/mailman/listinfo/ppe_list
All interested faculty and students are invited to attend.
Andy Eggers (University of Oxford), "Susceptibility to strategic voting: a comparison of plurality and instant-runoff elections" (Download paper below)
Advocates of the instant-runoff voting system (IRV, a.k.a. ranked-choice voting) often argue that it is less susceptible to strategic voting than plurality. Is this true? More generally, how should we define and measure a voting system’s susceptibility to strategic voting? Previous research in this area is unsatisfying, largely because it ignores the uncertainty voters face when they vote. We introduce a better approach and use it to show that IRV elections are far less susceptible to strategic voting than plurality elections given preference data from 160 election surveys and realistic assumptions about uncertainty and voter behavior. The difference arises partly because, as other voters vote more strategically, strategic voting incentives tend to increase in plurality but decrease in IRV. The methods we introduce can be used to study other properties of voting systems when voters are strategic.
Co-sponsored by FAS and IQSS, the Program on Political Economy (PE) supports research-related activities that integrate the study of economics and politics, whether by studying economic behavior in the political process or political behavior in the marketplace. In general, positive political economy is concerned with showing how observed differences among institutions affect political and economic outcomes in various social, economic, and political systems and how the institutions themselves change and develop in response to individual and collective beliefs, preferences, and strategies.
LOCATION:Zoom - see below STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20201029T203000Z DTEND:20201029T214500Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR