I’m rather cynical about the value of academic research to the general public, as applied to civic voting in modern Western jurisdictions. But I realize that I’m assuming far too much about what you mean by “voting theory” based only on outside reading, this post, and your post asking about basic research grants.
There are a LOT of decisionmaking, conflict-resolution, and preference-sharing topics that could be extremely interesting and useful outside of the political domain (and a number of important topics inside that domain that I wouldn’t call “voting theory”, but maybe you do).
Some of the topics mentioned in https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/improving-institutional-decision-making/ would be extremely useful to solve (or even just to measure better), and in most cases can be applied to smaller organizations and firms without the constraint of appearing to have equal votes over a large, diverse (and “diversely-rational”) electorate. And even there, they note that implementation may be more difficult (and valuable) than research.
Gah, I meant simply to note my ignorance on your actual proposed area of work, and to ask “Do you have a summary of the research domain you’re proposing?”? Please pretend I wrote that rather than the rest of my rambling.
I’m rather cynical about the value of academic research to the general public, as applied to civic voting in modern Western jurisdictions. But I realize that I’m assuming far too much about what you mean by “voting theory” based only on outside reading, this post, and your post asking about basic research grants.
There are a LOT of decisionmaking, conflict-resolution, and preference-sharing topics that could be extremely interesting and useful outside of the political domain (and a number of important topics inside that domain that I wouldn’t call “voting theory”, but maybe you do).
Some of the topics mentioned in https://80000hours.org/problem-profiles/improving-institutional-decision-making/ would be extremely useful to solve (or even just to measure better), and in most cases can be applied to smaller organizations and firms without the constraint of appearing to have equal votes over a large, diverse (and “diversely-rational”) electorate. And even there, they note that implementation may be more difficult (and valuable) than research.
Gah, I meant simply to note my ignorance on your actual proposed area of work, and to ask “Do you have a summary of the research domain you’re proposing?”? Please pretend I wrote that rather than the rest of my rambling.