The Legislator as Political Entrepreneur: Investment in Political Capital

This paper applies the standard Austrian theory of capital investment to the standard interest group model of legislator behavior. Distinguishing between reputational capital and representative capital as interdependent forms of political capital, I argue that legislator behavior (specifically roll call voting) can be explained as entrepreneurial investment in political capital under uncertainty. I discuss several examples in which this approach can potentially add predictive power regarding legislative voting.     

What motivates bandwagon voting behavior: Altruism or a desire to win?

This paper surveys the literature on psychological and strategic mental processes of bandwagon behavior, discusses the literature of bandwagon behavior in the context of the two different types, bandwagon vote choices and bandwagon abstention effects, and examines the rationality of other-regarding bandwagon vote choices. Key experimental results are reported to investigate the extent that bandwagon behavior can be explained by other-regarding preferences in contrast to a psychological desire to simply support a winner. We find support for purely psychological non-other-regarding bandwagon behavior but primarily when subjects have information about the distribution of voter choices in previous elections but individual choices are private. Interestingly, when voting is public this type of bandwagon behavior disappears and bandwagon behavior that could be other-regrading is much higher. Given that observability increases other-regarding behavior in other contexts, our results suggest that some of the observed bandwagon behavior may be explained by other-regarding preferences as well.     

Conservative Politicians and Voting on Same‐sex Marriage

We examine whether conservative politicians are less likely to support same‐sex marriage when they run for office in safe rather than in contested districts using new data based on a roll‐call vote in the national German parliament. The results show that the margin of the majority for the incumbent in the previous election was a strong predictor for supporting same‐sex marriage. When the majority increased by a 1 percentage point, the likelihood of voting in favour of same‐sex marriage decreased by around 1.3 percentage points. We conjecture that politicians are election‐motivated – even when submitting roll‐call votes on a matter of conscience.     

Abstention and signaling in large repeated elections

I consider a two period model of repeated elections in which politicians update their beliefs about the preferences of the voters after the first period election and set second period policies accordingly. When voting is costless, a positive fraction of voters abstains for any finite population, but abstention vanishes in the limit of an arbitrarily large election. I demonstrate that in large elections, a single vote changes second period policies by an amount exponentially large compared to the probability of influencing the first period election if the probabilities with which voters vote for the two candidates differ. Using this, I prove that the limiting voting behavior in the first election is independent of the first period policy choices of the candidates. The incentive to vote to signal oneʼs preferences thus dominates the incentive to vote to increase the chances of electing oneʼs preferred candidate.     

Legislators in the crossfire: Strategic non-voting and the effect of transparency

When committee members care about their reputation with a principal, making their choices transparent affects the outcome. In Parliaments, legislators care about their reputation with several principals, namely their constituents and Party leaders. It is thus unclear in which direction votes will move when they become observable, and moreover legislators may prefer to opt out of voting entirely in order to avoid conflict. This paper first uses French voting data to show that reputational concerns drive the decision to participate in a vote: in order to avoid blame legislators are less likely to vote when there is disagreement between the constituents and the Party. Second, making legislators’ votes public increases their incentive to use voting for reputation-building, and, therefore, the distortion in group decision-making. The French transparency reform of 2014 provides a quasi-natural setting for a Difference-in-Differences analysis. Greater transparency led to less participation, as legislators preferred not to take sides.     

The political economy of immigration in a direct democracy: The case of Switzerland

In this paper, we analyze the determination of immigration policy in a direct democracy setting. We formulate a model of voting and participation behavior integrating instrumental and expressive motivations. The model is estimated using data drawn from a survey carried out after a vote in Switzerland in 2000 on a popular initiative proposing to implement immigration restrictions. The model enables us to recover estimates of participation costs and preferences towards immigration and analyze how these preferences are translated into actual voting outcomes. The results reveal a substantial gap (“participation bias”) between attitudes towards immigration in the general population (43% favorable to restrictions) and the outcome of the vote (26%).     

Compulsory versus voluntary voting: An experimental study

We report on an experiment comparing compulsory and voluntary voting institutions in a voting game with common preferences. Rational choice theory predicts sharp differences in voter behavior between these two institutions. If voting is compulsory, then voters may find it rational to vote insincerely, i.e., against their private information. If voting is voluntary so that abstention is allowed, then sincere voting in accordance with a voter's private information is always rational while participation may become strategic. We find strong support for these theoretical predictions in our experimental data. Moreover, voters adapt their decisions to the voting institution in place in such a way as to make the group decision accuracy differences between the two voting institutions negligible. The latter finding may serve to rationalize the co-existence of compulsory and voluntary voting institutions in nature.     

The effect of randomized school admissions on voter participation

There is little causal evidence on the effect of economic and policy outcomes on voting behavior. This paper uses randomized outcomes from a school choice lottery to examine if lottery outcomes affect voting behavior in a school board election. We show that losing the lottery has no significant impact on overall voting behavior; however, among white families, those with above median income and prior voting history, lottery losers were significantly more likely to vote than lottery winners. Using propensity score methods, we compare the voting of lottery participants to similar families who did not participate in the lottery. We find that losing the school choice lottery caused an increase in voter turnout among whites, while winning the lottery had no effect relative to non-participants. Overall, our empirical results lend support to models of expressive and retrospective voting, where likely voters are motivated to vote by past negative policy outcomes.     

Mapping the theory of political representation to the empirics: An investigation for proportional and majoritarian rules

We combine roll call votes and referendum decisions on identically worded legislative proposals to identify the effect of electoral rules on the way Swiss Members of Parliament (MPs) represent their constituents’ preferences. We exploit the fact that MPs in both Houses of Parliament are elected in the same electoral districts (the cantons). Yet, in the Lower House, MPs are elected using a proportional rule, while in the Upper House they are elected employing a majoritarian rule. We find that electoral rules matter strongly for political representation. The voting patterns of MPs are fully in line with three theoretical predictions regarding the influence of electoral rules on representation of constituents’ preferences: 1) The probability that a proportional-elected MP accepts a legislative proposal closely follows the share of voters that accept the proposal in the referendum. 2) In contrast, for majority-elected MPs the probability of acceptance is strongly increasing in the share of voter acceptance if the latter is close to the 50% threshold. 3) The estimated probability that an Upper House MP votes “yes” as a function of the share of voters voting “yes” in the referendum has an S-shape form with an inflection point close to 50%.     

Voting about immigration policy: What does the Swiss experience tell us?

This paper draws on Swiss direct democracy to review the Swiss experience with immigration, which has been shaped strongly by regular voting on immigration policies. Relying on two unique post-vote data-sets on how Swiss citizens voted on initiatives directed at containing the proportion of foreigners in the population, we improve on past empirical evidence by by-passing the problem of “hypothetical bias” present in the analysis of conventional survey data. Controlling for the participation bias due to non-mandatory voting, we find evidence that the hypothetical bias hampering pre-vote surveys may be large but that turnout does not have a decisive influence on the outcome of a vote. Confirming political–economy predictions, education matters in the shaping of immigration preferences but non-economic arguments also play an important role.     

A new approach to measure tactical voting: evidence from the British elections

Although tactical voting attracts a great deal of attention, it is very hard to measure as it requires knowledge of both individuals’ voting choices as well as their unobserved preferences. In this article, we present a simple empirical strategy to nonparametrically identify tactical voting patterns directly from balloting results. This approach allows us to study the magnitude and direction of strategic voting as well as to verify which information voters and parties take into account to determine marginal constituencies. We show that tactical voting played a significant role in the 2010 election, mainly for Liberal–Democratic voters supporting Labour. Moreover, our results suggest that voters seem to form their expectations based on a national swing in vote shares rather than newspaper guides published in the main media outlets or previous election outcomes. We also present some evidence that suggests that campaign spending is not driving tactical voting.     

Voting on the environment: Price or ideology? Evidence from Swiss referendums

Studies on preferences for environmental quality usually posit that price and income explain most of the observed choices. Incorporating recent advances in the economics of non-selfish behavior into the traditional public choice approach, we argue that the willingness to contribute to public goods as well as social norms need to be taken into account when analyzing environmental voting outcomes. We study aggregate results of three ballot proposals in Switzerland put to vote in the year 2000 which foresaw different tax schemes on fossil energy. Our main results show that the aggregate level choice pattern is to be explained by income as well as structural attributes that make costs and benefits of the projects vary. More importantly, our results underline the importance of including variables pertaining to the notion of ideology, both in terms of statistical fit and obtaining unbiased estimates for price and income determinants.     

Context Effects in a Negatively Framed Social Dilemma Experiment

A number of studies of the positively-framed voluntary contribution mechanism (VCM) public goods game have examined the role of context on participant behavior. Relatively little attention, however, has been given to the effects of context in negatively-framed VCM games even though this setting is relevant to a wide array of real world challenges, such as common pool resource use and pollution externalities. This study uses a carefully-controlled laboratory experiment to investigate the degree to which the context in which decisions are made influences decision making in a negatively-framed VCM laboratory experiment. The context treatments that we evaluate vary communication, voting, and the status quo of the initial endowment. Results indicate that providing groups the opportunity to communicate and vote significantly reduces choices that impose external costs. Importantly, the pro-social effects of communication and voting are strongest when the status quo endowment is the private account, which generates costs on other participants. This result suggests that the effect of the status quo endowment is a function of whether the social dilemma is framed positively or negatively when communication between participants is allowed.     

Fully sincere voting

In a general social choice framework where the requirement of strategy-proofness may not be sensible, we call a social choice rule fully sincere if it never gives any individual an incentive to vote for a less-preferred alternative over a more-preferred one and provides an incentive to vote for an alternative if and only if it is preferred to the default option that would result from abstaining. If the social choice rule can depend only on the number of votes that each alternative receives, those rules satisfying full sincerity are convex combinations of the rule that chooses each alternative with probability equal to the proportion of the vote it receives and an arbitrary rule that ignores voters' preferences. We note a sense in which the natural probabilistic analog of approval voting is the fully sincere rule that allows voters maximal flexibility in expressing their preferences and gives these preferences maximal weight.     

Fully sincere voting

In a general social choice framework where the requirement of strategy-proofness may not be sensible, we call a social choice rule fully sincere if it never gives any individual an incentive to vote for a less-preferred alternative over a more-preferred one and provides an incentive to vote for an alternative if and only if it is preferred to the default option that would result from abstaining. If the social choice rule can depend only on the number of votes that each alternative receives, those rules satisfying full sincerity are convex combinations of the rule that chooses each alternative with probability equal to the proportion of the vote it receives and an arbitrary rule that ignores voters' preferences. We note a sense in which the natural probabilistic analog of approval voting is the fully sincere rule that allows voters maximal flexibility in expressing their preferences and gives these preferences maximal weight.     

Minority positions in the German Council of Economic Experts: A political economic analysis

I study diversity in views expressed by economists regarding appropriate economic policies. The dataset is for voting by economists on the German Council of Economic Experts, over the period 1971–2011. The results show that the best predictor of minority voting is having been nominated by the trade unions, which results in being some 70 percentage points more likely to vote against the majority opinion. The voting pattern confirms that ideological identity through the channel of political appointment influences economists' voting behavior.     

Pivots versus signals in elections

We consider a two-period model of elections in which voters have private information about their policy preferences. A first-period vote can have two types of consequences: it may be pivotal in the first election and it provides a signal that affects candidates' positions in the second election. Pivot events are exceedingly unlikely, but when they occur the effect of a single vote is enormous. In contrast, vote totals always have some signaling effect, but the effect of a single vote is small. We investigate which effect - pivot or signaling - drives equilibrium voting behavior in large electorates.     

Endogenous Policy Choice: The Case of Pollution and Growth

What determines the relationship between pollution and growth? Are the forces that explain the behavior over time of these quantities potentially useful for understanding more generally the relationship between policies and growth? In this paper we make a first attempt to analyze the equilibrium behavior of two quantities—the level of pollution and the level of income— in a setting in which societies choose, via voting, how much to regulate pollution. Our major finding is that, consistent with the evidence, the relationship between pollution and growth need not be monotone, and that the precise equilibrium nature of the relationship between the two variables depends on whether individuals vote over effluent charges or directly restrict the choice of technology. Moreover, our analysis of the pollution problem suggests that, more generally, endogenous policy choices should be taken seriously as potential sources of heterogeneity when cross-country differences in economic performance are studied. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: E2, O1, O2, Q2.     

Emigrants’ missing votes

What are the causal effects of emigration on election outcomes in the country of origin? Large emigration of high-skilled emigrants can lead to changes in the distribution of political preferences, which affect voting outcomes. Using administrative migration and voting data, we show that emigration from Poland following its accession to the European Union in 2004 caused an increase in vote shares for right-wing parties, while decreasing the vote share for left-wing parties due to emigrants’ missing left-leaning votes. To account for endogenous migration patterns, we construct an innovative instrument that measures the distance to the closest open EU border. Our results highlight that emigration enhances stayers’ trust in right-wing governments and increases stayers’ voting for parties with pro-European positions. Exploiting a change in voting rules over time allows to disentangle different mechanisms. These results have important implications for the design of voting policies.