POLS 1301 Lecture Notes - Lecture 6: Political Machine, Punched Card, Collective Action

• School: Texas Tech University
• Department: Political Science
• Course: POLS 1301
• Professor: markjonathanmckenzie

Document Summary

Political scientists are interested in knowing why people will be willing to vote in a democracy. So they developed an equation to come up to conclusions (p*b-c+d). In the equation, p is the probability that a person will vote; it is smaller in large populations, and larger in small populations. The presidential election is one where many people vote and so the value of p is going to be less. Presidential elections are a combination of 51 other elections. Here, it is desirable to win individual elections in each state. The person who wins, even if it by a small margin, gets all the votes from that state but it also depends on how the state allocates it. Most states allocate the votes to whoever wins. Mane and nebraska allocate votes according to the congressional district. If one wins at the congressional district gets all the votes.