Sometimes I like running little experiments—simulations, games, activities—in my classes. I think they’re useful to illustrate a point, or to dissect an argument, or even just to make complex ideas more accessible (and fun). This week I roped another six faculty into my latest project: presidential voting simulations.
I was interested to demonstrate the effect of electoral systems on party systems (such as “Duverger’s law”) & electoral behavior to my comparative politics students. In the past, I did a similar simulation at Western, but there I had more than 50 students. W/ only 29 students (and that’s if everyone came), I faced a serious “small-N” problem. Fortunately, six of my colleagues agreed to help.
I selected three different electoral systems that can be used in single member district (SMD) elections. So these are all essentially “plurality” systems—none are proportional representation systems (so, no, I wasn’t testing Duverger’s law). The three systems were:
1. Alternative vote (AV): Under this method, voters are given a list of candidates & must rank order their preferred candidates (“1” is most preferred). If no candidate wins a simple majority (50%+1), then the candidate w/ the fewest votes is dropped out, and his/her votes are transferred to the next preference. This is repeated until a candidate has a majority.
2. Two-round system (TRS): This is a simpler system. Voters cast a vote for one (and only one) candidate. To be elected, the candidate must win a majority; if no candidate wins a majority, then a second “runoff” election is scheduled between the top two candidates.
3. Ley de Lemas: This is a unique system. Voters are given a list of candidates, but the candidates are listed by party. Again, voters cast one (and only one) vote. But it’s not necessarily the candidate w/ the most votes that wins: the winner is the top candidate from the party that won (all together) more votes than any other party.
I ran the elections (doing all three elections took about 5-7 minutes in each class) in eight classes (one of my colleagues let me into two of her classes). And I’ve finished tabulating the votes (as you can imagine, the AV votes can take some time to count). The results are interesting:
In every electoral system, Obama wins (although he doesn’t win in every election in every class). But the numbers are different.
Under AV, Obama wins w/ a staggering 61.2% over Giuliani’s 38.8% (though Obama started w/ only 33.7% before the first vote transfers).
Under TRS, Obama wins a plurality (but not a majority), w/ a decent 36.0% over Giuliani’s 25.1% (McCain and Clinton were close w/ 14.9% & 14.3% respectively).
Under Ley de Lemas, the Democrats won 55.5% of the total vote, and Obama won 31.3% of the total vote (and 56.4% of the Democratic vote).
Clearly, it seems that Obama is the “Condorcet winner” among the 175-182 (the numbers for each voting system varied, since students arrive late to some classes) political science students at Dickinson College.
You’re welcome to look at the data, or to use the ballots I designed. Both files are available at: http://users.dickinson.edu/~centellm/sims/voting/
Hopefully, I can run this again w/ a larger sample (and tossing in some “third party” candidates) in the Fall. My goal is a 1,000+ sample.
