In representative democracies, regular election cycles are supposed to prevent misbehavior by elected officials, hold them accountable, and subject them to the “will of the people." Pandering, or dishonest preference reporting by candidates campaigning for election, undermines this democratic idea. Much of the work on Computational Social Choice to date has investigated strategic actions in only a single election. We introduce a novel formal model of pandering and examine the resilience of two voting systems, Representative Democracy (RD) and Flexible Representative Democracy (FRD), to pandering within a single election and across multiple rounds of elections. For both voting systems, our analysis centers on the types of strategies candidates employ and how voters update their views of candidates based on how the candidates have pandered in the past. We provide theoretical results on the complexity of pandering in our setting for a single election, formulate our problem for multiple cycles as a Markov Decision Process, and use reinforcement learning to study the effects of pandering by single candidates and groups of candidates over many rounds.
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Misperceptions, Depression, and Voting for Election Deniers in the United States
Two of the most significant concerns about the contemporary United States are the erosion of democratic institutions and the high rate of depression. We provide evidence connecting these phenomena. We use a survey (N = 11,517) to show a relationship between misperceptions (about COVID-19 vaccines) and voting, in 2022, for gubernatorial candidates who denied or cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election results. We further predict and find that the presence of moderately severe-to-severe depressive symptoms exacerbates the relationship between misperceptions and voting for election deniers or doubters. The results offer insight into the links between misperceptions, depression, and democratic backsliding (i.e., supporting candidates who challenge election results). We also contribute to a growing line of research on how mental health affects democratic functioning, potentially worldwide.
more » « less- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10504727
- Publisher / Repository:
- Oxford University Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- International Journal of Public Opinion Research
- Volume:
- 36
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 1471-6909
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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