The 2017 Third Vote Experiment: Choice of Questions

The 2016 electoral experiment described in Chapter 15 reveals that the critical point of the Third Vote is the selection of questions for electoral ballots. Since certain questions and their wordings can be favorable for some parties and unfavorable for others, the committee responsible for this task can be always accused of bias in their choices. Furthermore, a heuristic selection of questions may yield insufficient contrast between the parties, causing the equalization of the parliament faction weights. In the 2017 experiment conducted during the elections to the student parliament of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the parties are therefore asked to formulate the questions themselves and to answer the questions of the other parties. The collected questions are then reduced to a reasonable number by an optimization model aimed at distinguishing the party positions from one another, and only these questions are included on the electoral ballot. The 2017 experiment organized this way confirms that the Third Vote significantly increases the parliament’s representativeness while avoiding the suspicion of partiality. However, the equalization effect still persists.We suppose that this effect could be tackled if the questions magnified the multidimensional salience of the KIT political spectrum determined by the party policy profiles — to better reflect the many-sidedness of the electorate’s preferences.