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The Future of Digital Democracy pp 14–23Cite as

Experiments on the Reaction of Citizens to New Voting Rules: A Survey

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11300))

Abstract

This paper is a survey of what we learned from experiments about how innovations in the field of voting are received. Different experimental methods have been used: in the laboratory, on line and in situ. Preferences for voting rules are driven by self-interest, by a quest for simplicity and are also correlated with political attitudes. For most rules, voters show no cognitive barriers to their use, but for more complex rules, serious misunderstanding can appear.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    1R is mainly used in the Anglo-saxon tradition (India, USA, UK).

  2. 2.

    For presidential-like elections, most countries use 2R, with variants.

  3. 3.

    This rule is not used for political presidential-like elections.

  4. 4.

    That is almost the whole population over 18. In France almost all citizens are registered, even if they do not vote.

  5. 5.

    Such a bias is intuitively understandable: by definition, conservative voters are less attracted by the idea of changing things, and our research is presented to the participants as: “Help us to study alternative voting rules.” But still, one would like to deepen this point, that we observed repeatedly and that was, to the best of my knowledge, not previously noticed in the literature.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. CNRS, Paris School of Economics, 48 Boulevard Jourdan, 75014, Paris, France

    Jean-François Laslier

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  1. Jean-François Laslier
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Correspondence to Jean-François Laslier .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy

    Pierluigi Contucci

  2. University of Bologna, Cesena, Italy

    Andrea Omicini

  3. University of Bologna, Cesena, Italy

    Danilo Pianini

  4. University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy

    Alina Sîrbu

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Laslier, JF. (2019). Experiments on the Reaction of Citizens to New Voting Rules: A Survey. In: Contucci, P., Omicini, A., Pianini, D., Sîrbu, A. (eds) The Future of Digital Democracy. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11300. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05333-8_2

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