Suchergebnisse

Abstract
The U.S. Electoral College's winner-take-all method of awarding electoral votes creates a high susceptibility to disputes and errors, but past reform attempts have glossed over their likely disruptions to power balances among states and between the two political parties. This gap is filled by connecting pragmatic models of power shifts and election disputability to a historically informed probabilistic model of future elections. This methodology is then applied to a continuum of reform proposals between the current system and the Lodge-Gossett version of a national popular vote. The results show that a modest smoothing of winner-take-all near the toss-up point delivers a good tradeoff between reducing dispute frequency and distorting power balances, enabling meaningful reform in an era of high polarization. This conclusion holds for extrapolation of the current national landscape into near-future elections, as well as for more arbitrary distributions of partisans among states to represent far-future landscapes. However, as electoral award smoothing diminishes the frequency of disputed elections, it inevitably broadens their scope.

The events of 2000 inspired renewed debate in America over the manner in which presidents are chosen, with many critics of the existing system favoring the alternative of direct popular election. These advocates of reform often argue that the strategic environment shaped by the electoral college distorts the democratic process by encouraging candidates to focus on a few politically competitive states while virtually ignoring the majority of the nation. Using empirical evidence, we evaluate the claim that the electoral college is antidemocratic due to its effect on campaign strategy. Furthermore, we consider the possible alternative strategies adopted by candidates under a hypothetical national popular presidential election. We conclude that many of the consequences of electoral college reform, unacknowledged by its proponents, would not necessarily make presidential elections substantially more democratic, and we call for additional empirical research on a topic that has heretofore been dominated by theoretical debate and speculation.

Different institutions can produce more (or less) preferred outcomes, in terms of citizens' preferences. Consequently, citizen preferences over institutions may 'inherit'-to use William Riker's term-the features of preferences over outcomes. But the level of information and understanding required for this effect to be observable seems quite high. In this paper, we investigate whether Riker's intuition about citizens acting on institutional preferences is borne out by an original empirical dataset collected for this purpose. These data, a survey commissioned specifically for this project, were collected as part of a larger nationally representative sample conducted right before the 2004 election. The results show that support for a reform to split a state's Electoral College votes proportionally is explained by (1) which candidate one supports, (2) which candidate one thinks is likely to win the election under the existing system of apportionment, (3) preferences for abolishing the Electoral College in favor of the popular vote winner, and (4) statistical interactions between these variables. In baldly political terms, Kerry voters tend to support splitting their state's Electoral College votes if they felt George W. Bush was likely to win in that state. But Kerry voters who expect Kerry to win their state favor winner-take-all Electoral College rules for their state. In both cases, mutatis mutandis, the reverse is true for Bush voters. Adapted from the source document.

This article examines opinion dynamics on the complicated public policy issue of Electoral College reform. The study shows how partisan perceptions and political sophistication affect opinion on Electoral College reform. Taking advantage of an experiment and of an analysis of polls after the 2000 election, this study finds that those with higher levels of political sophistication were more likely to oppose reform. Proponents of reform often rely on simple majoritarian arguments while those opposed to reform are forced to justify the Electoral College based on more complicated arguments involving federalism and support for the two‐party system. Those with higher levels of political sophistication were more likely to understand, and hence accept, difficult arguments made by opponents of reform. Partisanship also played an important influence in shaping attitudes toward the Electoral College.