Endorsement Without New Evidence: How Sequential Voting Inflates Mandates in Online Community Governance

📅 2026-09-08
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🤖 AI Summary
研究解决了在线社区选举中支持率高可能夸大独立审查的问题,通过分析维基百科管理员选举中的投票理由,引入了投票-文本差异度量方法。
📝 Abstract
Online communities often treat large support margins in public elections as strong mandates. We argue that such margins can overstate the independent scrutiny behind a decision. Using 198,275 free-text rationales from Wikipedia admin elections, we introduce vote-text divergence, a measure that flags a decisive vote paired with a thin, deferential rationale. Divergence rises as voters arrive later, even after controlling for voter and election fixed effects. The pattern is consistent with information saturation: once prior text is accounted for, arrival order no longer predicts divergence, while accumulated prior evidence does. The effect is strongest among peripheral voters in the co-voting network. Yet divergence does not predict worse post-promotion outcomes, such as administrative activity or survival. Public tallies can therefore weaken the scrutiny signal even while selecting capable administrators: a margin may appear to reflect more consensus and support than it actually contains.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

online communities
public elections
independent scrutiny
information saturation
voter rationale
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

vote-text divergence
information saturation
sequential voting
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