Abstention and signaling in large repeated elections |
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| Institution: | 1. Department of Systems and Computational Biology, Albert Einstein College of Medicine, Bronx, New York;2. Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois;1. Division of Environmental Health and Risk Management, School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, United Kingdom;2. TRIPP, Indian Institute of Technology-Delhi, New Delhi, India;3. Division of Atmospheric Sciences, DRI, Reno, NV, USA;4. Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology-Kanpur, Kanpur, UP, India;5. Environmental Sciences Division, Central Road Research Institute, Mathura Road, New Delhi, 110025, India;1. School of Economics and Key Laboratory of Mathematical Economics, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, 111 Wuchuan Rd, 200433 Shanghai, China;2. CREED, University of Amsterdam, Roetersstraat 11, 1018 WB Amsterdam, Netherlands;3. Tinbergen Institute, 1082 MS Amsterdam, Netherlands;4. Amsterdam School of Economics, University of Amsterdam, Roetersstraat 11, 1018 WB Amsterdam, Netherlands;1. University of California, Davis, United States;2. FGV, EPGE Escola Brasileira de Economia e Finanças, Brazil;3. International School of Economics and Management, Capital University of Economics and Business, China |
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| Abstract: | 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 one?s preferences thus dominates the incentive to vote to increase the chances of electing one?s preferred candidate. |
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