Online communities often treat large support margins in public elections as strong mandates. We argue that such margins can overstate the independent scrutiny behind a decision. Using 198,275 free-text rationales from Wikipedia admin elections, we introduce vote-text divergence, a measure that flags a decisive vote paired with a thin, deferential rationale. Divergence rises as voters arrive later, even after controlling for voter and election fixed effects. The pattern is consistent with information saturation: once prior text is accounted for, arrival order no longer predicts divergence, while accumulated prior evidence does. The effect is strongest among peripheral voters in the co-voting network. Yet divergence does not predict worse post-promotion outcomes, such as administrative activity or survival. Public tallies can therefore weaken the scrutiny signal even while selecting capable administrators: a margin may appear to reflect more consensus and support than it actually contains.
Liquid democracy permits voters to vote directly or delegate their votes to others. Existing algorithmic analyses assign each voter a single scalar parameter, interpreted as an independent probability of voting for the ground truth. This representation is inadequate when delegation is fixed before public information ch...
Seth Gilbert, Stefan Schmid, Santiago Schnell et al.· 0 citations
Confidence in the conduct and results of American elections has declined and polarized along party lines in recent years. Can a nonpartisan public information campaign featuring election officials enhance trust in elections when delivered to skeptical voters during a contentious political contest? We analyze a preregis...
Thad Kousser, Seth J. Hill, Neil Malhotra et al.· Science Advances· 0 citations
The majority-vote requirement was initiated in jurisdictions lacking two-party competition in order to ensure that officeholders have a broader base of support and as a check against undesirable candidates who could secure a plurality but lack majority support. Runoffs and other two-stage formats like the instant run...
While electoral systems shape candidates’ incentives to cultivate personal reputations, institutional rules do not translate mechanically into campaign behaviour. We argue that both electoral institutions and ideological traditions shape campaign strategies: ideological traditions influence both the attractiveness of c...
Julius Lehtinen, Mikko Mattila, Åsa von Schoultz· Party Politics· 0 citations
What accounts for the variation in the cost of voting in the American states between the 1996 and 2024 presidential elections? Parties act rationally to manipulate voting costs, expanding access when it mobilizes supporters and restricting access when it risks benefiting opponents. This study tests these expectations u...
Why do voters reject constitutional proposals drafted by conventions they themselves elected? We study a two-stage constitutional process in which voters first elect a legislator to draft a new constitution and subsequently approve or reject it in a referendum. The model highlights how imperfect electoral signals gener...
Álvaro Bustos, Nuno Garoupa· Journal of Theoretical Polit...· 0 citations
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