Do Grades Have Absolute Meaning ? An Experiment on Majority Judgment

Théo Delemazure, Roberto Brunetti (), Antoinette Baujard and Sylvain Bouveret ()
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Théo Delemazure: LAMSADE - Laboratoire d'analyse et modélisation de systèmes pour l'aide à la décision - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres
Roberto Brunetti: LEMMA - Laboratoire d'économie mathématique et de microéconomie appliquée - Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas, Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas, GATE Lyon Saint-Étienne - Groupe d'Analyse et de Théorie Economique Lyon - Saint-Etienne - UL2 - Université Lumière - Lyon 2 - UJM - Université Jean Monnet - Saint-Étienne - EM - EMLyon Business School - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Sylvain Bouveret: Fondation Grenoble INP, UGA - Université Grenoble Alpes

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Abstract: Whether in education, performance reviews, or elections, grades serve as tools for assessment, yet the universality of their meanings remains an open question. Whenvoting under majority judgment, voters assign verbal grades such as "excellent, very good, good, fairly good, acceptable, insufficient, to reject" to each candidate. Themeaning of these grades should be clear and consistent across all voters. Balinski and Laraki (2011) describe this as a "common language" and claim that the grade labels convey absolute meaning. This paper tests the assumption of absolute meaning by examining whether the meaningofagradedependsonthegradingscale(i.e., framing effect) in a political context. We conducted an online experiment (N=1,955) in which participants voted for candidates to the French presidential elections under majority judgment withgrading scales with different numbers of grades. Our findings indicate that the grade distributions obtained by candidates are significantly influenced by the grading scales available to voters. Our data therefore rejects the assertion that grades convey absolute meaning, showing instead that their interpretation depends on the number of grades available.

Keywords: Voting behavior; Majority Judgment; Ballot information; Online Experiment; Framing effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03-20
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05114129v2
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