Economic Voting Theory in the Philippines

The study examined how the performance of the politicians influences the voters’ decisions in the elections. The researchers modified Reed’s (1994) performance-based voting model to evaluate the performance of the politicians during their term in office. Since the model is a repeated election framework, the researchers focused on the senatorial elections during the Arroyo to Duterte administration (2004-2019) in the Philippines. The framework was used to determine whether the prospective or retrospective voting theories occurred in the elections and was able to compute for the value of the office of the politicians and evaluate their performance in office. The study showed that the retrospective voting theory occurred more than the prospective voting theory. It also showed that the citizens would vote for the senator regardless of their performance in office.

Reasoning with PCP-Nets

We introduce PCP-nets, a formalism to model qualitative conditional preferences with probabilistic uncertainty. PCP-nets generalise CP-nets by allowing for uncertainty over the preference orderings. We define and study both optimality and dominance queries in PCP-nets, and we propose a tractable approximation of dominance which we show to be very accurate in our experimental setting. Since PCP-nets can be seen as a way to model a collection of weighted CP-nets, we also explore the use of PCP-nets in a multi-agent context, where individual agents submit CP-nets which are then aggregated into a single PCP-net. We consider various ways to perform such aggregation and we compare them via two notions of scores, based on well known voting theory concepts. Experimental results allow us to identify the aggregation method that better represents the given set of CP-nets and the most efficient dominance procedure to be used in the multi-agent context.

On the Distortion Value of Elections with Abstention

In Spatial Voting Theory, distortion is a measure of how good the winner is. It has been proved that no deterministic voting mechanism can guarantee a distortion better than 3, even for simple metrics such as a line. In this study, we wish to answer the following question: how does the distortion value change if we allow less motivated agents to abstain from the election? We consider an election with two candidates and suggest an abstention model, which is a general form of the abstention model proposed by Kirchgässner. Our results characterize the distortion ¨ value and provide a rather complete picture of the model.

¿Una antinomia constitucional? El sufragio (des)igual en la Constitución de 1978

Se aborda la peculiar situación jurídico-política del sufragio igual en nuestro país. Las perspectivas que se utilizan son sobre todo las propias de tres disciplinas bien diferenciadas: la Filosofía Política, el Derecho Constitucional y la Ciencia Política. A ellas se une, además, el enfoque propio de una rama del conocimiento más joven y menos frecuentada, la Teoría de las Votaciones. Las conclusiones son considerablemente preocupantes: por un lado, empíricamente, España es uno de los países del mundo con una mayor desigualdad de voto; por otro, jurídicamente, la constitución de 1978 se encuentra presa de una antinomia que ha impedido que el derecho fundamental de los ciudadanos al voto igual pueda ser protegido constitucionalmente.The article examines the legal and political state of equal suffrage in Spain. The perspectives applied are fundamentally those of three well differentiated subject areas: Political Philosophy, Constitutional Law and Political Science. In addition, the text also grounds on a more younger field, the Voting Theory. The conclusions reached are highly worrying: not only that Spain is the country with one of the highest verifiable incidence of inequality in its voting system, but also that its Constitution of 1978 is host to a legal antinomy that has impeded adequate constitutional protection to guarantee the fundamental right of its citizens to an equal vote.