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

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2609.09321v1
• Date: Tue, 08 Sep 2026 18:06:15 GMT
• Title: Endorsement Without New Evidence: How Sequential Voting Inflates Mandates in Online Community Governance
• Abstract summary: We introduce vote-text divergence, a measure that flags a decisive vote paired with a thin, deferential rationale.<n> Divergence rises as voters arrive later, even after controlling for voter and election fixed effects.<n>The effect is strongest among peripheral voters in the co-voting network.
• Score: 4.327699139300453
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• 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.

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