Working Papers by Andrew Gelman
Showing 1 to 6 of 6 records.
# | Title | Authors | Date | Length | Paper | Abstract | |
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1173 | An Experimental Study of Storable Votes | Casella, Alessandra Gelman, Andrew Palfrey, Thomas R. | 09/01/2003 | 69 pages | wp1173.pdf | The storable votes mechanism is a method of voting for committees that meet periodically to consider a series of binary decisions. Each member is allocated a fixed budget of votes to be cast as desired over the multiple decisions. Voters are induced to spend more votes on those decisions that matter to them most, shifting the ex ante probability of winning away from decisions they value less and towards decisions they value more, typically generating welfare gains over standard majority voting with non-storable votes. The equilibrium strategies have a very intuitive feature the number of votes cast must be monotonic in the voter's intensity of preferences but are otherwise difficult to calculate, raising questions of practical implementation. In our experiments, realized efficiency levels were remarkably close to theoretical equilibrium predictions, while subjects adopted monotonic but off-equilibrium strategies. We are lead to conclude that concerns about the complexity of the game may have limited practical relevance. | |
1141 | The Mathematics and Statistics of Voting Power | Gelman, Andrew Katz, Jonathan N. Tuerlinckx, Francis | 10/01/2002 | wp1141.pdf | |||
1134 | Empirically Evaluating the Electoral College | Katz, Jonathan N. Gelman, Andrew King, Gary | 05/01/2002 | wp1134.pdf | |||
1133 | Standard Voting Power Indexes Don't Work: An Empirical Analysis | Gelman, Andrew Katz, Jonathan N. Bafumi, Joseph | 10/01/2002 | wp1133.pdf | |||
1121 | How Much does a Vote Count? Voting Power, Coalitions, and the Electoral College | Gelman, Andrew Katz, Jonathan N. | 05/01/2001 | 21 pages | wp1121.pdf | In an election, the probability that a single voter is decisive is affected by the electoral system, that is, the rule for aggregating votes into a single outcome. Under the assumption that all votes are equally likely (i.e., random voting), we prove that the average probability of a vote being decisive is maximized under a popular-vote (or simple majority) rule and is lower under any coalition system, such as the U.S. Electoral College system, no matter how complicated. Forming a coalition increases the decisive vote probability for the voters within a coalition, but the aggregate effect of coalitions is to decrease the average decisiveness of the population of voters. We then review results on voting power in an electoral college system. Under the random voting assumption, it is well known that the voters with the highest probability of decisiveness are those in large states. However, we show using empirical estimates of the closeness of historical U.S. Presidential elections that voters in small states have been advantaged because the random voting model overestimates the frequencies of close elections in the larger states. Finally, we estimate the average probability of decisiveness for all U.S. Presidential elections from 1960 to 2000 under three possible electoral systems: popular vote, electoral vote, and winner-take-all within Congressional districts. We find that the average probability of decisiveness is about the same under all three systems. | |
1091 | Post-Stratification without Population Level Information on the Post-Stratifying Variable, with Application to Political Polling. | Reilly, Cavan Gelman, Andrew Katz, Jonathan N. | 05/01/2000 | 21 pages | wp1091.pdf | We investigate the construction of more precise estimates of a collection of population means using information about a related variable in the context of repeated sample surveys. The method is illustrated using poll results concerning presidential approval rating (our related variable is political party identification). We use post-stratification to construct these improved estimates, but since we don't have population level information on the post-stratifying variable, we construct a model for the manner in which the post-stratifier develops over time. In this manner, we obtain more precise estimates without making possibly untenable assumptions about the dynamics of our variable of interest, the presidential approval rating. |