How Communication Can Make Voters Choose Less Well
Authored by Ulrike Hahn, Sydow Momme von, Christoph Merdes
Date Published: 2019
DOI: 10.1111/tops.12401
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Abstract
With the advent of social media, the last decade has seen profound
changes to the way people receive information. This has fueled a debate
about the ways (if any) changes to the nature of our information
networks might be affecting voters' beliefs about the world, voting
results, and, ultimately, democracy. At the same time, much discussion
in the public arena in recent years has concerned the notion that
ill-informed voters have been voting against their own self-interest.
The research reported here brings these two strands together:
simulations involving agent-based models, interpreted through the formal
framework of Condorcet's (1785) jury theorem, demonstrate how changes to
information networks may make voter error more likely, even though
individual competence has largely remained unchanged.
In recent years, the receipt and the perception of information has
changed in ways which have fueled fears about the fates of our
democracies. However, real information on these possibilities or the
direction of these changes does not exist. Into this gap, Hahn and
colleagues bring the power of Condorcet's (1785) Jury Theorem to show
that changes in our information networks have affected voter
inter-dependence so that it is likely that voters are now collectively
more ignorant even if individual voter competence remains unchanged.
Tags
Agent-based modeling
Communication
Voting
Self
Economy
Vote aggregation
Condorcet jury theorem
Symbolic politics