SÉMINAIRE DE RECHERCHE EN ÉCONOMIE - GATE LYON SAINT-ÉTIENNE : Pantelis Pipergias Analytis

Pantelis Pipergias Analytis (University of Southern Denmark), présentera un séminaire intitulé : The majority rule’s Achilles heel.

Résumé / abstract  : Parties from the far right are on the rise across Europe, while in some countries they have even secured the first position in elections (e.g. the Netherlands), giving them an advantage in subsequent government formation negotiations. At the same time, a majority of people strongly disapprove of these parties, and in systems with two election rounds (e.g. France), other parties of very different political leanings coalesce against them. How can this paradox be explained? We point out that majority voting only registers information on the extreme preferences of voters, disregarding information about the preference order from there on, or preference intensity, especially in regard to negative preferences. Thus, it confers an advantage to parties that have a group of staunch supporters, but can be otherwise polarizing. We illustrate this phenomenon by contrasting the results from majority voting with results from alternative voting systems such as the Borda rule and approval voting, on data from the CSES dataset from recent European elections. We show that parties in the edges of the political spectrum are doing comparatively much better under the majority rule when compared to other voting schemes. We complement this analysis with a computational model based on the mean voter theorem showing that under certain conditions parties in the extremes tend to perform best under the majority rule, but do much worse when alternative voting systems such as approval voting or the Borda rule are applied.