Statistical Properties of the Proportional Voting Process

Gradowski, T.; Kosiński, R. A.

doi:10.12693/aphyspola.114.575

“…The most studied feature is the distribution of the number of votes of candidates212223242526272829303132333435. In the first analysis by Costa Filho et al21, the distribution of the fraction of votes received by candidates in Brazilian federal and state elections seems to decay as a power law with exponent −1 in the central region.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Universality in voting behavior: an empirical analysis

Chatterjee

¹

,

Mitrović

²

,

Fortunato

³

2013

Sci Rep

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Election data represent a precious source of information to study human behavior at a large scale. In proportional elections with open lists, the number of votes received by a candidate, rescaled by the average performance of all competitors in the same party list, has the same distribution regardless of the country and the year of the election. Here we provide the first thorough assessment of this claim. We analyzed election datasets of 15 countries with proportional systems. We confirm that a class of nations with similar election rules fulfill the universality claim. Discrepancies from this trend in other countries with open-lists elections are always associated with peculiar differences in the election rules, which matter more than differences between countries and historical periods. Our analysis shows that the role of parties in the electoral performance of candidates is crucial: alternative scalings not taking into account party affiliations lead to poor results.

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“…The most studied feature is the distribution of the number of votes of candidates [21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35]. In the first analysis by Costa Filho et al [21], the distribution of the fraction of votes received by candidates in Brazilian federal and state elections seems to decay as a power law with exponent −1 in the central region.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Universality in voting behavior: an empirical analysis

Chatterjee

¹

,

Mitrović

²

,

Fortunato

³

2012

Preprint

0

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Election data represent a precious source of information to study human behavior at a large scale. In proportional elections with open lists, the number of votes received by a candidate, rescaled by the average performance of all competitors in the same party list, has the same distribution regardless of the country and the year of the election. Here we provide the first thorough assessment of this claim. We analyzed election datasets of 15 countries with proportional systems. We confirm that a class of nations with similar election rules fulfill the universality claim. Discrepancies from this trend in other countries with open-lists elections are always associated with peculiar differences in the election rules, which matter more than differences between countries and historical periods. Our analysis shows that the role of parties in the electoral performance of candidates is crucial: alternative scalings not taking into account party affiliations lead to poor results.

show abstract