?
Strategic Behavior of Voters in Virtual Societies: Case of Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee Elections
Both theoretical and empirical study dedicated to collective choice has shown that people sometimes vote inconsistently with their true preferences, and the results of elections held under any non-dictatorial voting system can be affected by insincere behavior. This provokes the following question: why voters diverge from their true preferences while participating in elections? Real political elections do not provide an opportunity to compare voters' preferences and votes, so in this paper I investigate voters' behaviour using the unique setting – Russian Wikipedia’s Arbitration Committee elections. In the paper several measures of voting inconsistence and electoral context are proposed and situations at 14 elections (from November 2009 to May 2015) are analyzed.