Abstract
In 2002 and 2007, during the French presidential elections, several experiments have taken place, designed to test the reaction of the public to new voting rules. What have we learned from them so far? These experiments are of a rather original nature and raise several methodological issues with respect to their design and to the analysis of their results. To assert what can be learned and what cannot be learned, I will discuss the methodological issues at stake. I will in particular show that the conclusions to be derived from such experiments are very sensitive to some details of the protocol and also to some details of the voting rules under scrutiny.
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Notes
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The original papers are: Balinski et al. (2003), Balinski and Laraki (2007), Baujard and Igersheim (2007), Laslier and Van der Straeten (2002, 2004, 2008). See also a similar experiment on Approval Voting made in the town of Messel (Germany) by Alós–Ferrer and Granić (2010), during the 2008 state elections in Hesse.
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Baujard and Igersheim (2007) slightly move away from this methodology by asking participants to fill questionaires.
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In 2002, a priori negative opinions about these experiments were held by some colleagues, and some elected officials. They predicted very low participation rates, based on their own claimed experience in organizing public consultation on local issues. Some were reluctant to the very idea of experimentation in the field of politics, arguing that, by principle, one should not mix serious political matters with adventurous ideas.
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Laslier, JF. (2011). Lessons from In Situ Experiments during French Elections. In: Dolez, B., Grofman, B., Laurent, A. (eds) In Situ and Laboratory Experiments on Electoral Law Reform. Studies in Public Choice, vol 25. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7539-3_5
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