The Art of Legitimate Decision Making

Carina I. Hausladen

Why US Politics is Broken—and How to Fix it.
1,481,549 views | Andrew Yang | April 2024

How are different voting methods perceived?

Are there differences with respect to legitimacy?

How Voting Rules Impact Legitimacy

Carina I. Hausladen, Regula Hänggli-Fricker, Dirk Helbing, Renato Kunz, Junling Wang, Evangelos Pournaras

Behavioral Experiment

A voting method

consists of an 

input mechansim and 

an aggregation rule.

Four voting methods

Measuring Legitimacy

Scharpf (1999), Schmidt (2013)

• input-legitimacy
• output-legitimacy 
• throughput legitimacy

Weil and Hänggli (2021)

• empirically measure those dimensions
• four clusters of questions
   
• found that all factors load on PC1 (74% of variance)
• allows us to address them with a single question

acceptance

influence

trust

fairness

Measuring Legitimacy

Please assess the following statement for each voting method applied.

Context

Context

Polarizing

Context

Polarizing

• Vaccine regulation
  • How should the government regulate COVID-19 vaccines?
• ICU access
  • Among COVID-19 patients, which criteria should grant access to an intensive care unit?
• Infection protection
  • Which protection measure(s) against a COVID-19 infection is the most effective one?
• Government strategy
  • Which strategy should the government adopt to fight the COVID-19 pandemic?

• Vaccine regulation
• ICU access
• Infection protection
• Government strategy

Control question

choose one

approve,

stay neutral,

disapprove

assign points

0

0

1

3

5

choose & rank

1

2

3

Results

• $n=120$
• 36% female
• Mean age: $\mu =25.47$
• 37% with Bachelor's degree
• 22 countries

Vaccine regulation

ICU access
 

Infection protection

Government strategy

Winning options vary by input method.

Vaccine regulation

ICU access
 

Infection protection

Government strategy

Vaccine regulation

ICU access
 

Infection protection

Government strategy

Standard deviation
(Schmitt, 2016)

Divisiveness
(Navarrete et al., 2022)

Infection protection

Government strategy

Vaccine regulation

ICU access
 

The choice of voting method is especially crucial when preferences are highly polarized. 

Vaccine regulation

ICU access
 

Infection protection

Government strategy

4—

3—

2—

1—

0—

4—

3—

2—

1—

0—

4—

3—

2—

1—

0—

Color

COVID
 

Is range voting always the best choice in a political context?

Measuring consistency

majority

voting

combined approval

voting

range

voting

modified Borda

voting

0

0

1

3

5

1

2

Measuring consistency

Among COVID-19 patients, which criteria should grant access to an intensive care unit?

no vaccine denial

no lockdown violation

no health self-damage

youngest

oldest

majority

voting

combined approval

voting

range

voting

modified Borda

voting

Inconsistent Voter

Conclusion

Lottery A: 90% chance to win $10

Lottery B: 10% chance to win $100
 

Lichtenstein and Slovic (1971)

How much would you be willing to pay for each lottery?

A > B​

B > A

Which lottery would you prefer to play?

Can we empower citizens to be less susceptible to these effects?

Cognitive & Behavioral Factors.
Comparability Bias.
Framing Effect.
Cognitive Limitations.

A virtual reality experiment to study pedestrian perception of future street scenarios

J Argota Sánchez-Vaquerizo, CI Hausladen, et al., Scientific Reports, 2024.

Citizens’ assemblies, and discussion groups can reduce the effects of framing and other cognitive biases on preferences.

Instead, preferences are often formed online and based on resources that are deliberately designed to polarize.

How can deliberative processes in urban planning be scaled while maintaining constructive discussion and fostering stable preferences?

An exciting new possibility:

Carina I. Hausladen, Manuel Knott, Colin F. Camerer, Pietro Perona.

Social perception of faces in a vision-language model

Submitted to FaccT 2025.

Carina I. Hausladen, Manuel Knott, Colin F. Camerer, Pietro Perona.

Can we transfer these insights to AI Alignment?

• What to ask?

• How to ask?

• How to aggregate?

Appendix

Perception of legitimacy is linked to appreciating flexibility in range voting.  

The independence of the perceived legitimacy from COVID- 19-related topics confirms the validity of our legitimacy framework.

VoteLab:

A Modular and Adaptive Experimentation Platform for Online Collective Decision Making

Renato Kunz, Fatemeh Banaie, Abhinav Sharma,
Carina I. Hausladen, Dirk Helbing and Evangelos Pournaras

On the stability of cooperative behavior

Given that social prefrences for cooperation
and cooepration can be seen as a set as a style of large scale oooepration is there probablt a social prefernce for frequent stretch shifting?
Should we account for this in our styrategy on how we go about voting beavhior?
What could be some new ways that we look at all of this?

Policy Implications

If

little experience in direct democratic participation

facing a new or polarizing context

Graduated approach

first select and communicate the deciding voting method

then progressively engage voters with the issue through multiple rounds

from simple majority voting to more complex methods like range voting.

This graduated approach could help voters to crystallize their preferences without feeling overwhelmed.

Which software allows us to test our hypothesis?

Digital voting platforms

limited number of voting methods

lack of meta-data collection for understanding voting behavior

Interested in VoteLab?