Score voting or range voting is an electoral system for single-seat elections, in which voters give each candidate a score, the scores are added, and the candidate with the highest total is elected. It has been described by various other names including evaluative voting, utilitarian voting, interval measure voting, the point system, ratings summation, 0-99 voting, average voting and utilityvoting. It is a type of cardinal voting electoral system, and aims to implement the utilitarian social choice rule.
The Condorcet paradox in social choice theory is a situation noted by the Marquis de Condorcet in the late 18th century, in which collective preferences can be cyclic, even if the preferences of individual voters are not cyclic. This is paradoxical, because it means that majority wishes can be in conflict with each other: Majorities prefer, for example, candidate A over B, B over C, and yet C over A. When this occurs, it is because the conflicting majorities are each made up of different groups of individuals.
Public choice, or public choice theory, is "the use of economic tools to deal with traditional problems of political science". Its content includes the study of political behavior. In political science, it is the subset of positive political theory that studies self-interested agents and their interactions, which can be represented in a number of ways – using standard constrained utility maximization, game theory, or decision theory. It is the origin and intellectual foundation of contemporary work in political economy.
Accountability, in terms of ethics and governance, is equated with answerability, blameworthiness, liability, and the expectation of account-giving. As in an aspect of governance, it has been central to discussions related to problems in the public sector, nonprofit and private (corporate) and individual contexts. In leadership roles, accountability is the acknowledgment and assumption of responsibility for actions, products, decisions, and policies including the administration, governance, and implementation within the scope of the role or employment position and encompassing the obligation to report, explain and be answerable for resulting consequences.
The bandwagon effect is the term used to describe the tendency for people to adopt certain behaviors, styles, or attitudes simply because others are doing so.
The monotonicity criterion is a voting system criterion used to evaluate both single and multiple winner ranked voting systems. A ranked voting system is monotonic if it is neither possible to prevent the election of a candidate by ranking them higher on some of the ballots, nor possible to elect an otherwise unelected candidate by ranking them lower on some of the ballots. That is to say, in single winner elections no winner is harmed by up-ranking and no loser is helped by down-ranking. Douglas R. Woodall called the criterion mono-raise.
The League of Conservation Voters (LCV) is an American environmental advocacy group. LCV says that it "advocates for sound environmental laws and policies, holds elected officials accountable for their votes and actions, and elects pro-environment candidates." The organization pursues its goals through voter education, voter mobilization, and direct contributions to political candidates. LCV includes 29 state affiliates. LCV was founded in 1970 by environmentalist Marion Edey, with support from David Brower. The group's current president is Gene Karpinski. It is headquartered in Washington, D.C., and has over two million members.
Political polarization is the extent to which opinions on an issue are opposed, and the process by which this opposition increases over time.
Social choice theory or social choice is a theoretical framework for analysis of combining individual opinions, preferences, interests, or welfares to reach a collective decision or social welfare in some sense. A non-theoretical example of a collective decision is enacting a law or set of laws under a constitution. Social choice theory dates from Condorcet's formulation of the voting paradox. Kenneth Arrow's Social Choice and Individual Values (1951), Amrtya Sen's Nobel Prize winning work, Arrow's impossibility theorem and generally acknowledged as the basis of the modern social choice theory. In addition to Arrow's theorem and the voting paradox, the Gibbard–Satterthwaite theorem, the Condorcet jury theorem, the median voter theorem, and May's theorem are among the more well known results from social choice theory.
A party-line vote in a deliberative assembly is a vote in which a substantial majority of members of a political party vote the same way.
The Borda count electoral system can be combined with an instant-runoff procedure to create hybrid election methods that are called Nanson method and Baldwin method. Both methods are designed to satisfy the Condorcet criterion, and allow for incomplete ballots and equal rankings.
Major General Richard William Howard Howard Vyse was a British soldier and Egyptologist. He was also Member of Parliament (MP) for Beverley and Honiton.
NOMINATE is a multidimensional scaling application developed by political scientists Keith T. Poole and Howard Rosenthal in the early 1980s to analyze preferential and choice data, such as legislative roll-call voting behavior. As computing capabilities grew, Poole and Rosenthal developed multiple iterations of their NOMINATE procedure: the original D-NOMINATE method, W-NOMINATE, and most recently DW-NOMINATE. In 2009, Poole and Rosenthal were named the first recipients of the Society for Political Methodology's Best Statistical Software Award for their development of NOMINATE, a recognition conferred to "individual(s) for developing statistical software that makes a significant research contribution". In 2016, Keith T. Poole was awarded the Society for Political Methodology's Career Achievement Award. The citation for this award reads, in part, "One can say perfectly correctly, and without any hyperbole: the modern study of the U.S. Congress would be simply unthinkable without NOMINATE legislative roll call voting scores. NOMINATE has produced data that entire bodies of our discipline—and many in the press—have relied on to understand the U.S. Congress."
Nolan Matthew McCarty is an American political scientist specializing in U.S. politics, democratic political institutions, and political methodology. He has made notable contributions to the study of partisan polarization, the politics of economic inequality, theories of policy-making, and the statistical analysis of legislative voting.
Francesco Parisi is a legal scholar and economist, working primarily in the United States and Italy. He is the Oppenheimer Wolff & Donnelly Professor of Law at the University of Minnesota Law School and Distinguished Professor of Economics at the University of Bologna. Parisi specializes in the economic analysis of law. His research uses formal models and technical results in areas from international law to behavioral law and economics to tort law.
Stephen Brock Blomberg is the 7th president of California Institute of Integral Studies. A macroeconomist and former Professor of economics at Claremont McKenna College, Blomberg is best known in academia for his work on the economics of terrorism.
Howard L. Rosenthal is a professor of politics at New York University. He has also taught at Carnegie-Mellon University and Princeton University, where he was the Roger Williams Straus professor of social sciences.
Quadratic voting is a collective decision-making procedure which involves individuals allocating votes to express the degree of their preferences, rather than just the direction of their preferences. By doing so, quadratic voting seeks to address issues of voting paradox and majority rule. Quadratic voting works by allowing users to "pay" for additional votes on a given matter to express their support for given issues more strongly, resulting in voting outcomes that are aligned with the highest willingness to pay outcome, rather than just the outcome preferred by the majority regardless of the intensity of individual preferences. The payment for votes may be through either artificial or real currencies. Quadratic voting is a variant of cumulative voting in the class of cardinal voting. It differs from cumulative voting by altering "the cost" and "the vote" relation from linear to quadratic.
Social utility efficiency (SUE) is a measurement of the utilitarian performance of voting methods—how likely they are to elect the candidate who best represents the voters' preferences.
Condorcet efficiency is a measurement of the performance of voting methods. It is defined as the percentage of elections for which the Condorcet winner is elected, provided there is one.
