Evaluative voting or classical voting rules: Does it make a difference? Empirical evidence for consensus among voting rules

摘要

We provide empirical evidence for Tullock's claim (Tullock (1967, 1981)) that many of the problems known from social choice literature do not show up in practice. In particular, even though theoretically the use of different voting rules can lead to very different outcomes, there appears to be rather high consensus among voting rules when applied to real-world preference data. In addition, the famous and widely studied problem of majority cycles seems to be of little significance in practice. In this study, based on data collected in an online-survey in connection with the 2015 parliament election in the Austrian federal state of Styria, we confirm these findings to a high degree. Our analysis is based on an approach using a nonparametric bootstrap and includes various forms of evaluative voting (which has recently received increasing attention).