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- Title
The price of a vote: Diseconomy in proportional elections.
- Authors
Melo, Hygor Piaget M; Reis, Saulo D S; Moreira, André A; Makse, Hernán A; Andrade, José S, Jr
- Abstract
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.
- Publication
PloS one, 2018, Vol 13, Issue 8, pe0201654
- ISSN
1932-6203
- Publication type
Journal Article
- DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0201654