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To determine whether large margins in public sequential voting reflect genuine independent scrutiny, the authors evaluate 198,275 free-text rationales from Wikipedia admin elections using a metric termed "vote-text divergence"—decisive support paired with minimal justification. Fixed-effects regressions show that divergence rises with voter arrival order as accumulated textual evidence saturates the deliberation, particularly among peripheral network participants. Crucially, while this dynamic does not harm downstream administrative survival or activity, it reveals that large victory tallies often represent an illusion of mandate rather than independent evaluation.
Sequential public votes systematically inflate consensus margins because late-arriving voters rubber-stamp prevailing outcomes with hollow justifications once debate evidence saturates.
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.