Saturday, January 5, 2013

Vote Distribution Depends on Party Popularity

It turns out that in elections, humans are not rational optimizers who weigh the likely policy outcomes from each individual candidate, but rather tribalists who vote by party afiliation. Who woulda thunkit! But seriously, the interesting observation is that there's actually a vote distribution that's followed universally and robustly by all democratic countries with similar voting rules, shown here. Estonia was the kicker - when it switched from its previous rules to its new ones, its voting distribution morphed into the new curve.

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