Do Democracies Possess the Wisdom of Crowds? Decision Group Size, Regime Type, and Strategic Effectiveness

Abstract What is it about democracies—if anything—that enables them to avoid war with each other while navigating conflictual international politics in pursuit of their own interests? Recent research in International Studies Quarterly by Brad LeVeck and Neil Narang (2017) provides an elegant new answer to this longstanding question. Drawing on “wisdom of crowds” logic—the insight that a large-enough group of inexpert judges is more likely to average towards an accurate estimate of a continuous variable than a smaller group, even when the smaller group contains relevant experts—supported by experimental evidence, they suggest that democracies’ strategic advantages lie in their large, diverse decision-making communities. If such crowd wisdom equips democracies to accurately assess others’ capabilities and intentions, so the argument goes, then they should be better than alternative regime types at maximizing their own interests while still avoiding the bargaining failure that is resort to war. Unfortunately, however, the politics of democratic foreign policy-making compromise the crowd-wisdom mechanism. This response article thus elucidates key flaws in the argument that crowd wisdom underpins democratic peace, before progressing to explain how the crowd-wisdom insight nonetheless carries important implications—irrespective of regime type—for strategic effectiveness.

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Regime Type, the Fate of Leaders, and War

American Political Science Review ◽

10.1017/s0003055410000195 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 104 (3) ◽

pp. 430-445 ◽

Cited By ~ 142

Author(s):

ALEXANDRE DEBS ◽

H.E. GOEMANS

Keyword(s):

Domestic Politics ◽

Formal Model ◽

Regime Type ◽

Democratic Peace ◽

Regime Types ◽

International Interaction ◽

The Relationship

We propose and test a formal model of war and domestic politics, building on recent evidence on the relationship between regime type, the effect of war on the probability of losing office, and the consequences of losing office. The less the outcome of international interaction affects a leader's tenure and the less punitive are the consequences of losing office, the more a leader is willing to make concessions to strike a peaceful bargain. We demonstrate that our theory successfully predicts war involvement among nondemocratic regime types. Moreover, our theory offers an intuitive explanation for the democratic peace. Compared to nondemocratic leaders, the tenure of democratic leaders depends relatively little on the war outcome, and democratic leaders fare relatively well after losing office. Thus, democratic leaders should be more willing and able to avoid war, especially with other democrats.

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Democracies, Territory, and Negotiated Compromises

Conflict Management and Peace Science ◽

10.1177/0738894211404797 ◽

2011 ◽

Vol 28 (3) ◽

pp. 261-279 ◽

Cited By ~ 13

Author(s):

Steven V. Miller ◽

Douglas M. Gibler

Keyword(s):

Regime Type ◽

Democratic Peace ◽

Militarized Disputes ◽

Democratic Peace Theory ◽

Regime Types ◽

Empirical Regularities ◽

Militarized Interstate Dispute

Multiple studies have confirmed that democracies are more likely than other regime types to resolve their militarized disputes through negotiation and compromise. We argue that these findings have not controlled for the types of disputes that are most likely to involve democracies. States have often resolved their most dangerous disputes, involving territorial issues with neighbors, prior to becoming democratic. Thus, the issues involving democracies are of less salience and are more easily negotiated with compromise. Using Militarized Interstate Dispute data from Correlates of War Project, 1816 to 2001, we confirm this explanation. The pacifying effect of regime type disappears once controls are added for proximity and issue type. We find that territorial issues among contiguous states are among the most difficult issues to resolve, and democracies are unlikely to be involved in these disputes. Our findings are an advancement of the territorial peace argument and present a first step in a re-examination of the broader empirical regularities associated with democratic peace theory.

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Making the most of individual differences in joint decisions

10.1093/oso/9780198789710.003.0004 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Bahador Bahrami

Keyword(s):

Decision Making ◽

Direct Evidence ◽

Cross Cultural ◽

Collective Decision Making ◽

Wisdom Of Crowds ◽

Trade Off ◽

Adaptive Value ◽

Joint Decisions ◽

Cultural Data ◽

Better Than

Evidence for and against the idea that “two heads are better than one” is abundant. This chapter considers the contextual conditions and social norms that predict madness or wisdom of crowds to identify the adaptive value of collective decision-making beyond increased accuracy. Similarity of competence among members of a collective impacts collective accuracy, but interacting individuals often seem to operate under the assumption that they are equally competent even when direct evidence suggest the opposite and dyadic performance suffers. Cross-cultural data from Iran, China, and Denmark support this assumption of similarity (i.e., equality bias) as a sensible heuristic that works most of the time and simplifies social interaction. Crowds often trade off accuracy for other collective benefits such as diffusion of responsibility and reduction of regret. Consequently, two heads are sometimes better than one, but no-one holds the collective accountable, not even for the most disastrous of outcomes.

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Security Analysis of Discrete-Modulated Continuous-Variable Quantum Key Distribution over Seawater Channel

Applied Sciences ◽

10.3390/app9224956 ◽

2019 ◽

Vol 9 (22) ◽

pp. 4956 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Xinchao Ruan ◽

Hang Zhang ◽

Wei Zhao ◽

Xiaoxue Wang ◽

Xuan Li ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Quantum Key Distribution ◽

Secure Communication ◽

Security Analysis ◽

Finite Size ◽

Key Distribution ◽

Continuous Variable ◽

Heterodyne Detection ◽

Secret Key ◽

Transmission Distance ◽

Better Than

We investigate the optical absorption and scattering properties of four different kinds of seawater as the quantum channel. The models of discrete-modulated continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) in free-space seawater channel are briefly described, and the performance of the four-state protocol and the eight-state protocol in asymptotic and finite-size cases is analyzed in detail. Simulation results illustrate that the more complex is the seawater composition, the worse is the performance of the protocol. For different types of seawater channels, we can improve the performance of the protocol by selecting different optimal modulation variances and controlling the extra noise on the channel. Besides, we can find that the performance of the eight-state protocol is better than that of the four-state protocol, and there is little difference between homodyne detection and heterodyne detection. Although the secret key rate of the protocol that we propose is still relatively low and the maximum transmission distance is only a few hundred meters, the research on CV-QKD over the seawater channel is of great significance, which provides a new idea for the construction of global secure communication network.

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Taxpayer behavioural factors influencing entrenched tax gaps

10.51415/10321/3752 ◽

2021 ◽

Author(s):

◽

Divakaran Reddy

Keyword(s):

Meta Analysis ◽

Tax Compliance ◽

Public Trust ◽

Accurate Estimate ◽

Research Approach ◽

International Studies ◽

Tax Revenues ◽

Study Results ◽

The Government ◽

Tax Noncompliance

Tax compliance is the willingness of taxpayers to obey tax rules of a nation, whilst tax noncompliance is the unwilling behaviour of citizens to act under tax regulations. Taxpayer compliance enables the government to collect tax revenues, which is one of the most important sources of government income. Altering the non-compliant behaviour of citizens is an important barometer for increasing tax revenues that contribute to the socio-economic development of a nation. Numerous quondam studies have been conducted strikingly in the past few decades on taxpayer compliance. However, there is a dearth of sufficient research currently on tax noncompliance behaviour. Moreover, the phenomenon of tax noncompliance has limited exploration from the vantage point of meta-analysis of primary research studies conducted, focussing on interrogating, and systematically categorising their results. Resultantly, the purpose of this study was to examine the previously related primary studies to determine those factors that have been judged to have influenced the tax compliance behaviour of citizens. This study has adopted the quantitative research approach and followed the preferred reporting items for systematic review (PRISMA) method and meta-analysis to provide an accurate estimate of the relationship that exists in a population of relevant tax noncompliance behavioural studies. The population comprised of 45 international studies conducted between the period 2015 to 2020 is selected for analysis. The study results indicate that the quality of tax administration systems and public trust in institutional governance are factors that have influenced taxpayer compliance positively. Poor government accountability mechanisms entrenched tax gaps, and developing public trust in government institutions were found to be universal to promote voluntary taxpayer compliance. This study has contributed significantly to the open discussion on tax compliance among researchers, governments, and businesses.

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Determinants of health and education equality: evidence from post-Soviet states

International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy ◽

10.1108/ijssp-07-2021-0177 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽

Author(s):

Angelo Vito Panaro

Keyword(s):

Civil Society ◽

Social Policy ◽

Civil Liberties ◽

Regime Type ◽

Social Equality ◽

Cross Sectional ◽

Content Type ◽

Civil Society Organisations ◽

Regime Types

PurposeThis article examines the determinants of social equality in the education and healthcare sectors in the 15 post-Soviet states. Focussing on regime type and civil society organisations (CSOs), it argues that countries where liberal principles of democracy are achieved or have a stronger civil society deliver a more equitable social policy.Design/methodology/approachThe empirical analysis rests upon a time-series cross-sectional (TSCS) analysis from 1992 to 2019. Data are collected from the Quality of Government (QoG) Dataset 2020 and the Variates of Democracy (V-DEM) Dataset 2020.FindingsThe findings demonstrate that while regime type only partially accounts for social equality, as electoral autocracies do not have more equitable social policy than close regime types and democracy weakly explains equality levels, the strength of CSOs is associated with more equality.Originality/valueThe article challenges dominant approaches that consider electoral democracy to be related to more equal social policy and demonstrates that de-facto free and fair elections do not impinge on social equality, while the strength of liberal and civil liberties and CSOs correlate with more equitable social policy.

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Is Democracy a Cause of Peace?

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics ◽

10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.287 ◽

2017 ◽

Cited By ~ 3

Author(s):

Dan Reiter

Keyword(s):

Dynamic System ◽

Violent Conflict ◽

Regime Type ◽

Careful Examination ◽

Democratic Peace ◽

Economic Factors ◽

Policy Debates ◽

System P ◽

Independent Variable ◽

And Gender

Essentially all scholars agree that the levels of violent conflict, especially wars, within democratic pairs of states are significantly lower than levels of violent conflict within other pairs of states. However, debate rages as to whether this observed correlation is causal or spurious. Does democracy actually cause peace? Answering this question is critical for both scholarly and policy debates. Critics have lodged two sets of arguments proposing that the observed correlation between democracy and peace does not mean that democracy causes peace. First, some claim that the peace observed among democracies is not caused by regime type, but rather by other factors such as national interest, economic factors, and gender norms. These critics often present statistical analyses in which inclusion of these or other factors render the democracy independent variable to be statistically insignificant, leading them to draw the conclusion that democracy does not cause peace. The second critique claims that there is a causal relationship between democracy and peace, but peace causes democracy and not the reverse. Peaceful international environments permit democracy to emerge, and conflictual international environments impede democracy. Though peace causes democracy, democracy does not cause peace. Careful examination of the theoretical claims of these critiques and especially the pertinent empirical scholarship produces two general conclusions. First, there is enough evidence to conclude that democracy does cause peace at least between democracies, that the observed correlation between democracy and peace is not spurious. Second, this conclusion notwithstanding, the critiques do make important contributions, in the sense that they demonstrate that several factors (including democracy) cause peace, that there may be some qualifications or limitations to the scope of the democratic peace, and that causality among factors like democracy and peace is likely bidirectional, part of a larger dynamic system.

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Three machine learning models for the 2019 Solubility Challenge

ADMET & DMPK ◽

10.5599/admet.835 ◽

2020 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

John Mitchell

Keyword(s):

Machine Learning ◽

Random Forest ◽

Gold Standard ◽

Challenge Test ◽

Wisdom Of Crowds ◽

Learning Models ◽

The Third ◽

Aqueous Solubilities ◽

Machine Learning Models ◽

Better Than

We describe three machine learning models submitted to the 2019 Solubility Challenge. All are founded on tree-like classifiers, with one model being based on Random Forest and another on the related Extra Trees algorithm. The third model is a consensus predictor combining the former two with a Bagging classifier. We call this consensus classifier Vox Machinarum, and here discuss how it benefits from the Wisdom of Crowds. On the first 2019 Solubility Challenge test set of 100 low-variance intrinsic aqueous solubilities, Extra Trees is our best classifier. One the other, a high-variance set of 32 molecules, we find that Vox Machinarum and Random Forest both perform a little better than Extra Trees, and almost equally to one another. We also compare the gold standard solubilities from the 2019 Solubility Challenge with a set of literature-based solubilities for most of the same compounds.

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Objective classification of changes in water regime types of the Russian Plain rivers utilizing machine learning approaches

10.5194/egusphere-egu2020-11553 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Alexander Ivanov ◽

Timophey Samsonov ◽

Natalia Frolova ◽

Maria Kireeva ◽

Elena Povalishnikova

Keyword(s):

Machine Learning ◽

Water Regime ◽

Cosine Similarity ◽

Regime Type ◽

Russian Plain ◽

Regime Types ◽

Objective Classification ◽

Seasonal Runoff ◽

Monthly Runoff

Hydrological regime classification of Russian Plain rivers was always done by hand and by using subjective analysis of various characteristics of a seasonal runoff. Last update to this classification was made in the early 1990s.&#160;In this work we make an attempt at using different machine learning methods for objective classification. Both clustering (DBSCAN, K-Means) and classification (XGBoost) methods were used to establish 1) if an established runoff types can be inferred from the data using supervised approach 2) similar clusters can be inferred from data (unsupervised approach). Monthly runoff data for 237 rivers of Russian Plain since 1945 and until 2016 were used as a dataset.&#160;In a first attempt dataset was divided into periods of 1945-1977 and 1978-2016 in attempt to detect changes in river water regimes due to climate change. Monthly data were transformed into following features: annual and seasonal runoff, runoff levels for different seasons, minimum and maximum values of monthly runoff, ratios of the minimum and maximum runoff compared to yearly average and others. Supervised classification using XGBoost method resulted in 90% accuracy in water regime type identification for 1945-1977 period. Shifts in water regime types for southern rivers of Russian Plain rivers in a Don region were identified by this classifier.DBSCAN algorithm for clustering was able to identify 6 major clusters corresponding to existing water regime types: Kola peninsula, North-East part of Russian Plain and polar Urals, Central Russia, Southern Russia, arid South-East, foothills and separately higher altitudes of the Caucasus. Nonetheless a better approach was sought due to intersections of a clusters because of the continuous nature of data. Cosine similarity metric was used as an alternative way to separate river runoff types, this time for each year. Yearly cutoff also allows us to make a timeline of water regime changes over the course of 70 years. By using it as an objective ground truth we plan to remake classification and clusterization made earlier and establish an automated way to classify changes in water regime over time.As a result, the following conclusions can be made<ol><li>It&#8217;s possible to train an accurate classifier based on established water regime type and apply it to detect changes in water regime types over the course of time</li> <li>By applying the classifier to different periods of time we can detect a shift to &#8220;southern&#8221; type of water regime in the central area of Russian Plain</li> <li>Despite the highly continuous nature of data it seems possible to use cosine similarity metric to separate water regime types into zones corresponding to established ones</li> </ol>The study was supported by the Russian Science Foundation (grant No.19-77-10032) in methods&#160;and Russian Foundation for Basic Research (grant No.18-05-60021)&#160;for analyses in Arctic region&#160;

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Exploring Attitudes Towards the Welfare State: Students' Views in Eight Democracies

Journal of Social Policy ◽

10.1017/s0047279406000109 ◽

2006 ◽

Vol 35 (4) ◽

pp. 607-628 ◽

Cited By ~ 26

Author(s):

CLARA SABBAGH ◽

PIETER VANHUYSSE

Keyword(s):

Welfare State ◽

Hierarchical Model ◽

A Priori ◽

Regime Type ◽

Internal Attribution ◽

Social Democratic ◽

External Attribution ◽

Regime Types ◽

Welfare Attitudes ◽

The Welfare State

We explore the dimensionality of attitudes towards the welfare state among university students in eight countries representing four worlds of welfare: liberal, radical, conservative and social democratic. We use new data from cross-nationally comparable 25-item questionnaires to derive a two-level bi-factorial hierarchical model that specifies six different attitude facets. These facets are clustered into two distinct sets of attitudes: the ‘market-based frame’, which entails (a) individualism, (b) work ethic and (c) internal attribution of inequality and the ‘welfare-statist frame’, which entails (d) egalitarian redistribution, (e) broad scope of welfare and (f) external attribution of social inequality. In line with our expectations, respondents across different regime types structured their welfare state attitudes according to the six a priori defined types of attitudes and two sets of opposing attitudes. The study also found that the six facets are differently affected by regime type, which further corroborates our argument that the construct of welfare attitudes is complex and inherently multidimensional.

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