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Speaker: Siddhartha Sahi (Rutgers)

Title: Simultaneous elections make single-party sweeps more likely

Abstract: In a country with multiple elections, it may prove economically expedient to hold some or all of them on a common polling date. We show that such a decision will bring about a systemic change at the political level;  an increase in the simultaneity of polling increases the likelihood that  a single party wins all the elections.

Our result holds under fairly general conditions and we discuss its applicability to the two most common real world electoral systems, namely "first-past-the-post" (most voters) and "party list proportional representation" (most countries). In the course of our analysis, we obtain a slight generalization of the Harris correlation inequality for monotone functions on the Boolean lattice.

This is joint work with Pradeep Dubey (Center for Game Theory, Stony Brook).

The talk will be elementary, self-contained, and suitable for a general audience.