Believe Me, I Can Change Your Vote! Sneak Peek Into PoliSci Class

Why I am taking Political Science?

For spring term, I decided to take time to learn things that I’ve always wanted to dive deep into. I grew up very interested in politics, and now, I can finally explore more and gain some of the answers I’ve been looking for in my Political Science class, Democracy and Dictatorship.

I come from Cambodia where politics are taboo and can be dangerous to study or talk about. At Carleton, however, I can explore it to my heart’s content! In the future, I want to make a difference in my country, and to do so, I believe it is vital to understand the political infrastructure and systems that govern the country. That is exactly what I can do with this class!

Designing the Experiment

For 5th Week, we dove into the executive and electoral rules that exist in the world today. The past few weeks have included a lot of theory and a wide array of information to absorb, so I was really excited to dive into the nitty gritty  of things such as the institutional designs of democratic regimes!

For our assignment this week, we were told to design an experiment that explores how electoral or executive design affects how voter would vote; in a sense, what went through my head was: “wow, can I change how people vote?!”

I designed this fun experiment called “Food For Five Years” which requires people to vote for one dish among ten options that the people in their country are going to eat for every meal for five years! Don’t you think it’s a tad similar to our presidential voting? I tried!

I created two voting systems: First Past The Post (FPTP) and Alternate Voting (AV), they are both plural voting systems. I gave people 10 different dishes ranging from pizza to dumplings!

So people can vote once for their top choice, and they can rank their choices. I wanted to find out would ranking the dishes change their top choice dish. What do you think?

Results from the Experiment

A total of 27 people responded, and they are of various ethnic and cultural backgrounds. For the FPTP voting system, most people vote for dumplings as their dish for EVERY meal for FIVE years. Wow!

As for the AV system though, surprisingly, Bibimbap (a Korean dish) won 1st choice and sushi won 2nd choice. I did not see that coming!

So yes, in this example, changing the voting system DOES affect how people vote.

What made people change their mind? Well, I asked this question and most people said, by choosing only one, they felt inclined to choose a more generalized dish that they feel most supported by all people. As for ranking their dishes, they feel they have more opinion, so they rank their personal favorite dish first, and then think about their next favorite, or next acceptable dish and so forth!

If you compare this to the voting systems around the world, many countries try to create the most fair system for the population to vote, and even then, discrepancies exists across all systems. So really, who designs the voting system has the power, so next time you vote, think hard!

Well, that’s it for now, until next time people!

Lita hails all the way from Phnom Penh, Cambodia. When not riding horses, petting them, or sketching a picture of them, she blogs her philosophical brain dumps on Medium. Other than that, Lita is passionate about social impact startups and edu-tech. She plans on majoring in Computer Science, but who knows, she could simply switch to Studio Art and spend her days drawing horses. Hey, that’s why we’re at Carleton, am I right? Meet the other bloggers!