On 21 January 2008, an Approval Voting poll was performed at three voting stations in Messel, Germany. This was part of a study (pdf) supervised by professors Carlos Alos-Ferrer & Dura-Georg Granis (both at the Department of Economics, University of Konstanz) and carried out with government approval and cooperation.
1909 voters participated – 72.6% of the voters at those election sites. In the district elections, voters approved an average of 1.86 candidates out of 8.
In the state elections, the average voter approved 2.25 parties out of 17.
In the state elections:
The Approval Voting unofficial election was held at the polling site, and simultaneously with, the real voting. The authors say:
With the Approval Voting System, the notion of the "two big parties" seems less appropriate to describe the political situation. There were in fact 4 parties which received an approval rate above 30%: the CDU, the SPD, the Greens and the FDP. On this basis, the results of a state election would have produced four major factions, each with a similar number of seats in Parliament. One could even infer on this basis, that the official vote's splitting of voter preferences into two political sides is an artificial product of the voting system. Parties such as the Greens and the FDP would have gained a great advantage through the Approval Voting system.
Thanks to the change from Plurality to Approval Voting, the third and fourth finishers swapped places and the sixth and seventh too. The Plurality results were
in order of decreasing approval count. Note the high shares for the two frontrunner parties. The Approval results were
which note gives more – sometimes much more – relatively to all third parties.
That was in the election for people for their district. There also was a second election for federal parties (Germany has party-list) which yielded similar results though with more permuting in the finish order. The paper in §4.0.2 also describes a second exit-poll experiment with 1431 voters on 27 Sept. 2009. This was 49.7% of the voters in the official election at the same places, now six voting stations in Konstanz. (This is to be described in more detail in a different paper, apparently.)
In this case, Approval Voting actually changed the winner (from the CDU to the Greens). However, this may have been somewhat due to "the fact Konstanz is a university town and not a uniform sample from all of Germany" as opposed to "the voting system change." The official Germany-wide winner was the CDU and it had a majority of the vote. The Konstanz winner was the Greens with 58.1% approval (while the SPD got 47.4% and the CDU got only 41.5%) – the only party to get more than 50% approval.
Note the Greens are a third party, and officially came in third with 20.1%. The average number of approvals per voter was 2.56. Again Approval Voting said there "really" should be 4, not 2, large parties (based on vote share) and the third parties got lots more votes relatively. Konstanz also awarded 20.8% approval to the anti-copyright "Pirate Party" which only got 3.7% of the official plurality vote.
French approval-voting study
French range-voting study
French multi-voting-method comparison multi-study
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