Title
Universality In Voting Behavior: An Empirical Analysis
Abstract
Election data represent a precious source of information to study human behavior at a large scale. In proportional elections with open lists, the number of votes received by a candidate, rescaled by the average performance of all competitors in the same party list, has the same distribution regardless of the country and the year of the election. Here we provide the first thorough assessment of this claim. We analyzed election datasets of 15 countries with proportional systems. We confirm that a class of nations with similar election rules fulfill the universality claim. Discrepancies from this trend in other countries with open-lists elections are always associated with peculiar differences in the election rules, which matter more than differences between countries and historical periods. Our analysis shows that the role of parties in the electoral performance of candidates is crucial: alternative scalings not taking into account party affiliations lead to poor results.
Year
DOI
Venue
2012
10.1038/srep01049
SCIENTIFIC REPORTS
Keywords
Field
DocType
behavior,politics
Econometrics,Probability and statistics,Economics,Proportional representation,Universality (philosophy),Voting behavior,Politics,Competitor analysis,First-past-the-post voting
Journal
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
3
2045-2322
6
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.67
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Arnab Chatterjee1174.35
Marija Mitrovic2767.19
Santo Fortunato34209212.38