Search by committee

We consider the problem of sequential search when the decision to stop is made by a committee and show that a unique symmetric stationary equilibrium exists given a log concave distribution of rewards. We compare search by committee to the corresponding single-agent problem and show that committee members are less picky and more conservative than the single agent. We show how (i) increasing committee size holding the plurality fraction constant and (ii) increasing the plurality rule affect the equilibrium acceptance threshold and expected search duration. Finally, we show that unanimity is optimal if committee members are sufficiently patient.     

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.     

Why votes have value: Instrumental voting with overconfidence and overestimation of others' errors

We perform an experiment in which subjects bid for participating in a vote. The setting precludes conflicts of interests or direct benefits from voting. The theoretical value of participating in the vote is therefore zero if subjects have only instrumental reasons to vote and form correct beliefs. Yet, we find that experimental subjects are willing to pay for the vote and that they do so for instrumental reasons. The observed voting premium in the main treatment is high and can only be accounted for if some subjects either overestimate their pivotality or do not pay attention to pivotality at all. A model of instrumental voting, which assumes that individuals are overconfident and that they overestimate the errors of others, is consistent with results from treatments that make the issue of pivotality salient to experimental subjects.     

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.     

Voting in small committees

We analyze the voting behavior of a small committee that has to approve or reject a project proposal whose return is uncertain. Members have diverse preferences: some of them want to maximize the expected value, while others have a bias towards project approval and ignore their information on the project value. We focus on the most efficient use of scarce information when members cannot communicate prior to voting, and we provide insights on the optimal composition of the committee. Our main result is that the presence of biased members can improve the voting outcome, by simplifying the strategies of unbiased members. Thus, committees with diverse members perform as well as homogeneous committees, and even better in some cases. In particular, when value-maximizing members outnumber biased members by one vote, the optimal equilibrium becomes unique.     

Mixed Motives: An Empirical Analysis of ILO Roll-Call Voting

In this empirical paper, we look at individual voting behaviour of government delegates to the International Labour Organization (ILO). We distinguish between the instrumental motive for voting, which consists in the chance that one's vote may turn the balance in favour of one's preferred outcome, and non-instrumental motives, such as a desire for good reputation. Empirically, the two can be identified because two alternatives, abstaining and not participating in the vote, do not differ in their instrumental value, but are likely to differ with respect to reputation aspects. The model is estimated by a multinomial logit with country-specific unobserved heterogeneity, using roll-call votes on the final passage of ILO conventions from 1977 to 1995. The hypothesis that voting is only instrumental is clearly rejected by the data.     

A note on power,satisfaction and group cohesiveness in a voting body

This essay discusses the power of an m-member subgroup of an N-member (N = 2n + 1) voting body, whose members vote either ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a given issue. Passage or defeat of an issue is determined by simple majority. The power of the subgroup is defined as the probability that the outcome of a vote changes if all the members of the group reverse their votes. We assume that across a sequence of issues voters' behavior can be described by a Pólya-Eggenberger probability model, containing a parameter interpretable as group cohesiveness. Special cases are bloc voting and completely independent voting.Our model allows us to study interesting intermediate cases, i.e., situations where group cohesiveness is less than that of bloc voting yet stronger than in the case of independence. Satisfaction, defined as the probability of voting with the majority, and individual power are discussed in the light of the model.     

Voting by veto

This paper describes a voting procedure for revealing preferences for public goods. The procedure consists of two steps: a proposal by each committee member to be added along with the status quo to form the issue set, and then, subsequent to a random determination of voting order, the elimination of one proposal from the issue set by each committee member. For any set of proposals and a given order of voting the procedure determines a unique, winning proposal. Under the procedure's incentives, the winning proposal tends to contain an equal sharing of the potential gains from collective action among the committee members.     

Voting as a signaling device

In this paper, citizens vote in order to influence the election outcome and in order to signal their unobserved characteristics to others. The model is one of rational voting and generates the following predictions: (i) The paradox of not voting does not arise, because the benefit of voting does not vanish with population size. (ii) Turnout in elections is positively related to the importance of social interactions. (iii) Voting may exhibit bandwagon effects and small changes in the electoral incentives may generate large changes in turnout due to signaling effects. (iv) Signaling incentives increase the sensitivity of turnout to voting incentives in communities with low opportunity cost of social interaction, while the opposite is true for communities with high cost of social interaction. Therefore, the model predicts less volatile turnout for the latter type of communities.     

The equivalence between costly and probabilistic voting models

In costly voting models, voters abstain when a stochastic cost of voting exceeds the benefit from voting. In probabilistic voting models, they always vote for a candidate who generates the highest utility, which is subject to random shocks. We prove an equivalence result: In two-candidate elections, given any costly voting model, there exists a probabilistic voting model that generates winning probabilities identical to those in the former model for any policy announcements, and vice versa. Thus many predictions of interest established in one of the models hold in the other as well, providing robustness of the conclusions to model specifications.     

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%).     

Constitutional choice in ancient Athens: the evolution of the frequency of decision making

Contrary to modern representative democracies where elections tend to take place years apart, in the direct democracy of ancient Athens the assembly of the citizens met to decide policy up to forty times per year. The paper explores a model of constitutional choice where self-interested citizens decide how long to wait until they vote by maximising the net gain from an uncertain voting outcome. It is found that the frequency of voting increases unambiguously when the probability of being a member of the winning majority increases, and decreases with the loss from being a member of the losing minority and the resource cost of the vote. Under some plausible conditions, the frequency also rises with increases in the utility gain from the vote, the discount rate, and the required majority to pass a policy motion. It is argued that those conditions were met in Athens.     

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.     

Is the median voter decisive? Evidence from referenda voting patterns

This paper examines whether the voter with the median income is decisive in local spending decisions. Previous tests have relied on cross-sectional data while we make use of a pair of California referenda to estimate a first difference specification. The referenda proposed to lower the required vote share for passing local educational bonding initiatives from 67 to 50% and 67 to 55%, respectively. We find that voters rationally consider future public service decisions when deciding how to vote on voting rules. However, the empirical evidence strongly suggests that an income percentile below the median is decisive for majority voting rules, especially in communities that have a large share of high-income voters with attributes that suggest low demand for public services. Based on a model that explicitly recognizes that each community contains voters with both high and low demand for public school spending, we also find that an increase in the share of low demand voters is associated with a lower decisive voter income percentile for the high demand group. This two type model implies that our low demand types (individuals over age 45 with no children) have demands that are 45% lower than other voters. Collectively, these findings are consistent with high-income voters with weak preferences for public educational services voting with the poor against increases in public spending on education.     

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.     

A theory on party discipline and vote switching by legislators

We develop a new theory of vote switching by legislators that defect from party line voting. In our model, ideological candidates select their party label and, once elected, vote in parliament. Political parties select their policy platform as to maximize votes while preserving their candidates’ loyalty. We find that legislators that defect from party line voting arise within the majority party. Besides, the more legislators care about their ideology and the less about their own reputation, the more they defect from party line voting. Interestingly, when a party has larger electoral advantage and its candidates sufficiently care about their reputation, such a party can propose a more polarized policy to avoid party defectors. Our model suggests that polarization incentivizes loyalty. Finally, we discuss the robustness of our results in multi-party systems and multi-constituency systems.     

Voting with the wallet

The vote with the wallet is a new, emerging feature of economic participation and democracy in the globally integrated market economy. This expression identifies the pivotal role that responsible consumption and investment can play in addressing social and environmental emergencies which have been aggravated by the asymmetry of power between domestic institutions and global corporations. In this paper, we examine (both in general and by using examples drawn from the financial and non-financial sectors) how ??voting?? for producers which are at the forefront of a three-sided efficiency which reconciles the creation of economic value with social and environmental responsibility may generate contagion effects by triggering ethical imitation of traditional profit-maximizing actors, thereby enhancing the production of positive social and environmental externalities. Within this new framework, policies that reduce the search and information costs of voting with the wallet may help socioeconomic systems to exploit the bottom-up market forces of other-regarding preferences, thereby enhancing opportunities to achieve well-being with reduced top-down government intervention.     

Noncooperative foundations of bargaining power in committees and the Shapley–Shubik index

In this paper we explore the noncooperative foundations of the bargaining power that a voting rule gives to each member of a committee that bargains in search of consensus over a set of feasible agreements under a voting rule. Assuming complete information, we model a variety of bargaining protocols and investigate their stationary subgame perfect equilibria. We show how the Shapley–Shubik index and other power indices can be interpreted as measures of ‘bargaining power’ that appear in this light as limit cases.     

Storable votes

Motivated by the need for more flexible decision-making mechanisms in the European Union, the paper proposes a simple but novel voting scheme for binary decisions taken by committees that meet regularly over time. At each meeting, committee members are allowed to store their vote for future use; the decision is then taken according to the majority of votes cast. The possibility of shifting votes intertemporally allows agents to concentrate their votes when preferences are more intense, and although the scheme will not achieve full efficiency, storable votes typically lead to ex ante welfare gains over non-storable votes. Welfare gains can be proven rigorously in the case of 2 voters. With more voters, counterexamples can be found, but the analysis suggests that the welfare improvements should continue to hold if one of the following conditions is satisfied: (i) the number of voters is above a minimum threshold; (ii) preferences are not too polarized; (iii) the horizon is long enough.