The price of a vote: Diseconomy in proportional elections.

Autor: Melo HPM; Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia do Ceará, Avenida Des. Armando de Sales Louzada, Acaraú, Ceará, Brazil.; Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal do Ceará, 60451-970 Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil., Reis SDS; Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal do Ceará, 60451-970 Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil., Moreira AA; Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal do Ceará, 60451-970 Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil., Makse HA; Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal do Ceará, 60451-970 Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil.; Levich Institute and Physics Department, City College of New York, New York, NY 10031, United States of America., Andrade JS Jr; Departamento de Física, Universidade Federal do Ceará, 60451-970 Fortaleza, Ceará, Brazil.
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: PloS one [PLoS One] 2018 Aug 22; Vol. 13 (8), pp. e0201654. Date of Electronic Publication: 2018 Aug 22 (Print Publication: 2018).
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0201654
Abstrakt: The increasing cost of electoral campaigns raises the need for effective campaign planning and a precise understanding of the return of such investment. Interestingly, despite the strong impact of elections on our daily lives, how this investment is translated into votes is still unknown. By performing data analysis and modeling, we show that top candidates spend more money per vote than the less successful and poorer candidates, a relation that discloses a diseconomy of scale. We demonstrate that such electoral diseconomy arises from the competition between candidates due to inefficient campaign expenditure. Our approach succeeds in two important tests. First, it reveals that the statistical pattern in the vote distribution of candidates can be explained in terms of the independently conceived, but similarly skewed distribution of money campaign. Second, using a heuristic argument, we are able to explain the observed turnout percentage for a given election of approximately 63% in average. This result is in good agreement with the average turnout rate obtained from real data. Due to its generality, we expect that our approach can be applied to a wide range of problems concerning the adoption process in marketing campaigns.
Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.
Databáze: MEDLINE
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