Roger Cremades

The two most common families of electoral systems (ESs), defining the rules used to elect assemblies and legislative institutions, are proportional representation (PR) and plurality (Bormann and Golder, 2013; Farrell, 2011). When they are evaluated, most often the arguments come from social choice theory and political science. The former overall uses an axiomatic approach that includes a list of mathematical criteria a system should fulfill (Urken et al., 1995; Sen, 1995). The latter predominantly focuses on the tradeoff between proportionality of apportionment and governability (Monroe, 1994; Carey and Hix, 2011). However, there is an ongoing discussion about which ES is the best (Bowler et al., 2005; Farrell and Gallagher, 1999) and which set of indexes and measures would be the most important in such assessment (Pennisi, 1998). Although previous research addressed various perceptions of fairness related to the proportionality of different ESs (Blau, 2004; Plescia et al., 2020), the sensitivity of ES to efforts that influence opinions has been neglected. Here, we address this research gap with a framework that can measure ESs’ susceptibility to different means of influence. Using a simulation study, we show that plurality ESs are less stable than PR. They are more susceptible to coordinated efforts to influence opinions, for example, by political agitators and media propaganda. A review of real-world ES reveals possible improvements in their design, leading to lower susceptibility. Additionally, our simulation framework allows the computation of popular indexes, such as the Gallagher index and the effective number of parties, in different scenarios. Our work provides a new tool for dealing with modern threats to democracy that could destabilize voting processes (Hyde, 2020). Furthermore, our results add an important argument to a longstanding discussion on the evaluation of ES.

We assess wheat yield losses occurring due to ozone pollution in India and its economic burden on producers, consumers, and the government. Applying an ozone flux–based risk assessment, we show that ambient ozone levels caused a mean 14.18% reduction in wheat yields during 2008 to 2012. Furthermore, irrigated wheat was particularly sensitive to ozone-induced yield losses, indicating that ozone pollution could undermine climate-change adaptation efforts through irrigation expansion. Applying an economic model, we examine the effects of a counterfactual, “pollution-free” scenario on yield losses, wheat prices, consumer and producer welfare, and government costs. We explore three policy scenarios in which the government support farmers at observed levels of either procurement prices (fixed-price), procurement quantities (fixed-procurement), or procurement expenditure (fixed-expenditure). In pollution-free conditions, the fixed-price scenario absorbs the fall in prices, thus increasing producer welfare by USD 2.7 billion, but total welfare decreases by USD 0.24 billion as government costs increase (USD 2.9 billion). In the fixed-procurement and fixed-expenditure scenarios, ozone mitigation allows wheat prices to fall by 38.19 to 42.96%. The producers lose by USD 5.10 to 6.01 billion, but the gains to consumers and governments (USD 8.7 to 10.2 billion) outweigh these losses. These findings show that the government and consumers primarily bear the costs of ozone pollution. For pollution mitigation to optimally benefit wheat production and maximize social welfare, new approaches to support producers other than fixed-price grain procurement may be required. We also emphasize the need to consider air pollution in programs to improve agricultural resilience to climate change.

Extreme political populism has been fiercely spreading climate disinformation for years, contributing to a social divide about climate change. In order to profile how both sides of the climate divide communicate climate change, we collected dissemination materials and analysed the mindset of key actors reaching global audiences. We apply network science to textual content in order to reconstruct and analyse the mindsets of key actors across the climate divide. Here, we show that the emerging mindsets support the identification of emotional patterns – such as hypercritical scepticism masking falsehoods under a trustful promotion of change – linked to a quick and pervasive spread of falsehoods, i.e. an infodemic. We find that, in climate change disinformation, the word “climate” represents a fearsome threat linked to inconsistent science. We show that the word “change” represents a reassuring pattern in climate disinformation, characterised by trust and by low anticipation without risk awareness, except for some fear about policy changes. For climate activism, the word “change” is linked to high levels of negative emotions like anger, disgust, and fear related to a perception of existential threats. Furthermore, the word “children” represents an angering concern in climate disinformation, while climate change activism perceives “children” with trust and joy but also sadness for their anticipated future. Mindset reconstruction has the potential to become a relevant tool for identifying and flagging communication materials linked to disinformation, which amplifies the climate divide and facilitates infodemics.