Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-jn8rn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T12:35:01.415Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Prosociality in Majority Decisions: A Laboratory Experiment on the Robustness of the Uncovered Set

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2021

Jan Sauermann Open the ORCID record for Jan Sauermann [Opens in a new window]
Jan Sauermann*
Affiliation:
Cologne Center for Comparative Politics, University of Cologne, Cologne, Germany; Department of Social Sciences, Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg, Oldenburg, Germany
*
Corresponding author. Email: jan.sauermann@uni-koeln.de; Twitter: @jan_sauermann
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Social choice theory demonstrates that majority rule is generically indeterminate. However, from an empirical perspective, large and arbitrary policy shifts are rare events in politics. The uncovered set (UCS) is the dominant preference-based explanation for the apparent empirical predictability of majority rule in multiple dimensions. Its underlying logic assumes that voters act strategically, considering the ultimate consequences of their actions. I argue that all empirical applications of the UCS rest on an incomplete behavioral model assuming purely egoistically motivated individuals. Beyond material self-interest, prosocial motivations offer an additional factor to explain the outcomes of majority rule. I test my claim in a series of committee decision-making experiments in which I systematically vary the fairness properties of the policy space while keeping the location of the UCS constant. The experimental results overwhelmingly support the prosociality explanation.

Keywords

Chaos theoremscommittee decision-makingprosocialitymajority ruleuncovered set
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Experimental Political Science , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , Spring 2022 , pp. 22 - 35
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Experimental Research Section of the American Political Science Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This work has received generous funding from the Center for Social and Economic Behavior (C-SEB) at the University of Cologne. Financial support from the German Research Foundation (DFG) for the Cologne Laboratory for Economic Research is also gratefully acknowledged. I am grateful to Paul Beckmann for helping me conducting the experiments and Anne Kailuweit for her research assistance. I would also like to thank seminar and presentation participants at Cologne, Vienna, Oldenburg, Konstanz, EPSA (Vienna), and DVPW (Frankfurt) as well as the Associate Editor, three anonymous reviewers, André Kaiser, Bernhard Kittel, Ingo Rohlfing, and the members of the Kölumni-network for many helpful comments on prior versions of this manuscript. The data, code, and any additional materials required to replicate all analyses in this article are available at the Journal of Experimental Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: doi:10.1017/XPS.2020.43 (Sauermann 2020c). The author declares that there is no conflict of interest.

References

Belot, Michele, Duch, Raymond M., and Miller, Luis. 2015. A Comprehensive Comparison of Students and Non-Students in Classic Experimental Games. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization 113: 26–33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bianco, William T., Lynch, Michael S., Miller, Gary J., and Sened, Itai. 2006. “A Theory Waiting to Be Discovered and Used”: A Reanalysis of Canonical Experiments on Majority Rule Decision-Making. Journal of Politics 68(4): 838–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bianco, William T., Lynch, Michael S., Miller, Gary J., and Sened, Itai. 2008. The Constrained Instability of Majority Rule: Experiments on the Robustness of the Uncovered Set. Political Analysis 16(2): 115–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bianco, William T. and Sened, Itai. 2005. Uncovering Evidence of Conditional Party Government: Reassessing Majority Party Influence in Congress and State Legislatures. American Political Science Review 99(3): 361–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bicchieri, Christina. 2002. Covenants without Swords. Group Identity, Norms, and Communication in Social Dilemmas. Rationality and Society 14(2): 192–228.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bicchieri, Christina. 2006. The Grammar of Society: The Nature and Dynamics of Social Norms. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Bicchieri, Christina. 2010. Norms, Preferences, and Conditional Behavior. Politics, Philosophy and Economics 9(3): 297–313.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bolton, Gary E., and Ockenfels, Axel. 2000. ERC: A Theory of Equity, Reciprocity, and Competition. American Economic Review 90(1): 166–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cox, Gary W. 1987. The Uncovered Set and the Core. American Journal of Political Science 31(2): 408–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, Otto A., DeGroot, Morris H., and Hinich, Melvin J.. 1972. Social Preference Orderings and Majority Rule. Econometrica 40(1): 147–57.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eavey, Cheryl L. 1991. Patterns of Distribution in Spatial Games. Rationality and Society 3(4): 450–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Eavey, Cheryl L. and Miller, Gary J.. 1984. Fairness in Majority Rule Games with a Core. American Journal of Political Science 28(4): 570–86.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fehr, Ernst and Schmidt, Klaus M.. 1999. A Theory of Fairness, Competition, and Cooperation. Quarterly Journal of Economics 114(3): 817–68.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fischbacher, Urs. 2007. z-Tree: Zurich Toolbox for Ready-Made Economic Experiments. Experimental Economics 10(2): 171–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frohlich, Norman and Oppenheimer, Joe A.. 2007. Justice Preferences and the Arrow Problem. Journal of Theoretical Politics 19(4): 363–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Frohlich, Norman, Oppenheimer, Joe A., and Eavey, Cheryl L.. 1987. Laboratory Results on Rawls’s Distributive Justice. British Journal of Political Science 17(1): 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greiner, Ben. 2015. Subject Pool Recruitment Procedures: Organizing Experiments with ORSEE. Journal of the Economic Science Association 1(1): 114–25.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jeong, Gyung-Ho. 2008. Testing the Predictions of the Multidimensional Spatial Voting Model with Roll Call Data. Political Analysis 16(2): 179–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kam, Christopher, Bianco, William T., Sened, Itai, and Smyth, Regina A.. 2010. Ministerial Selection and Intraparty Organization in the Contemporary British Parliament. American Political Science Review 104(2): 289–306.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Marwell, Gerald and Ames, Ruth E.. 1981. Economists Free Ride, Does Anyone Else? Experiments on the Provision of Public Goods, IV. Journal of Public Economics 15(3): 295–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKelvey, Richard D. 1976. Intransitivities in Multidimensional Voting Models and Some Implications for Agenda Control. Journal of Economic Theory 12(3): 472–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miller, Nicholas. 1980. A New Solution Set for Tournament and Majority Voting. American Journal of Political Science 24(1): 68–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morton, Rebecca B. and Williams, Kenneth C.. 2010. Experimental Political Science and the Study of Causality: From Nature to the Lab. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ostrom, Elinor. 1998. A Behavioral Approach to the Rational Choice Theory of Collective Action. American Political Science Review 92(1): 1–22.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Penn, Elizabeth Maggie. 2006. Alternate Definitions of the Uncovered Set and Their Implications. Social Choice and Welfare 27(1): 83–87.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Plott, Charles R. 1967. A Notion of Equilibrium and Its Possibility under Majority Rule. American Economic Review 57(4): 787–806.Google Scholar
Rawls, John. 1971. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Riker, William H. 1980. Implications from the Disequilibrium of Majority Rule for the Study of Institutions. American Political Science Review 74(2): 432–46.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Riker, William H. 1982. Liberalism against Populism. A Confrontation between the Theory of Democracy and the Theory of Social Choice. San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company.Google Scholar
Rotemberg, Julio J. 2014. Models of Caring, or Acting as If One Cared, About the Welfare of Others. Annual Review of Economics 6: 129–54.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. [1762]1997. Rousseau: The ‘Social Contract’ and Other Later Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar
Sally, David. 1995. Conversation and Cooperation in Social Dilemmas. A Meta-Analysis of Experiments from 1958 to 1992. Rationality and Society 7(1): 58–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sauermann, Jan. 2016. Committee Decisions under Majority Rule Revisited. Journal of Experimental Political Science 3(2): 185–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sauermann, Jan. 2018. Do Individuals Value Distributional Fairness? How Inequality Affects Majority Decisions. Political Behavior 40(4): 809–29.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sauermann, Jan. 2020a. The Effects of Communication on the Occurrence of the Tyranny of the Majority under Voting by Veto. Social Choice and Welfare. doi: 10.1007/s00355-020-01268-w (online first)Google Scholar
Sauermann, Jan. 2020b. On the Instability of Majority Decision Making – Testing the Implications of the ‘Chaos Theorems’ in a Laboratory Experiment. Theory and Decision 88(4): 505–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sauermann, Jan. 2020c. Replication Data For: Prosociality in Majority Decisions: A Laboratory Experiment on the Robustness of the Uncovered Set. Harvard Dataverse. doi: 10.7910/DVN/NZ83TD Google Scholar
Sauermann, Jan and Kaiser, André. 2010. Taking Others into Account: Self-Interest and Fairness in Majority Decision Making. American Journal of Political Science 54(3): 667–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sauermann, Jan, Schwaninger, Manuel, and Kittel, Bernhard. 2020. Making and Breaking Coalitions: Strategic Foresight and Prosociality in Majority Decisions. Paper presented at the 2019 EPSA Annual Conference, Belfast.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schofield, Norman. 1978. Instability of Simple Dynamic Games. Review of Economic Studies 45(3): 575–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shepsle, Kenneth A. and Weingast, Barry R.. 1981. Structure–Induced Equilibrium and Legislative Choice. Public Choice 37(3): 503–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wittman, Donald. 2003. When Does Altruism Overcome the Intransitivity of Income Redistribution. In Rational Foundations of Democratic Politics, eds. Breton, A., Galeotti, G., Salmon, P. and Wintrobe, R. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 93–100.Google Scholar
Supplementary material: File

Sauermann supplementary material

Sauermann supplementary material

Download Sauermann supplementary material(File)
File 1.6 MB