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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Complete information pivotal-voter model with asymmetric group size and asymmetric benefits

We analyze a standard pivotal-voter model under majority rule, with two rival groups of players, each preferring one of two public policies and simultaneously deciding whether to cast a costly vote, as in Palfrey and Rosenthal (1983). We allow the benefit of the favorite public policy to differ across groups and impose an intuitive refinement, namely that voting probabilities are continuous in the cost of voting to pin down a unique equilibrium. The unique cost-continuous equilibrium depends on a key threshold that compares the sizes of the two groups.     

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%).     

Condorcet Jury Theorem: An example in which informative voting is rational but leads to inefficient information aggregation

Recent research on the Condorcet Jury Theorem has proven that informative voting (that is, voting according to one’s signal) is not necessarily rational. With two alternatives, rational voting typically leads to the election of the correct alternative, in spite of the fact that not all voters vote informatively. We prove that with three alternatives, there are cases in which informative voting is rational and yet leads to the election of a wrong alternative.     

On the political economy of immigration

We study how immigration policies that impose capital and skill requirements would be determined under majority voting when native agents differ in their wealth holdings and vote to maximize their income.     

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.     

Asymmetric Equilibria in a Model with Costly Voting

Most of the voting models limit their analysis to the investigation of symmetric equilibria where “similar” voters make “similar” voting decisions. In this paper we examine the validity of this restriction in a model with costly plurality voting. We first show that in any pure strategy equilibrium every two individuals who have the same preferences and participate in elections, would vote for the same candidate. However, this result does not hold for mixed strategies equilibria.     

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.     

Maximizing votes under imperfect information

This paper presents an alternative, sympathy voting, to the usual public choice approaches. It deals with voters whose decision depends both on an economic component and a sympathy component. The politician is perfectly informed of the economic component, but not of the sympathy component. The paper compares vote maximization under sympathy voting to the maximization of votes which come from pure homines oeconomici. Sympathy voting is defined in such a way that pure economic voting is its limiting case. The latter property can be used to apply the classical Lagrangean technique to maximizing votes under economic voting. The approach is applied to two typical examples of political choice: the property tax/local public expenditure decision, and public pricing of local public utilities.     

Does violence against civilians depress voter turnout? Evidence from Bosnia and Herzegovina

We investigate the effect of violence against civilians on voting. Using data from elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1990 and 2014 and exploiting variation in war intensity across municipalities, we estimate a negative impact on voter turnout. The effect is stable and persistent over twenty years after the war resolution. Our results are robust to the inclusion of pre- and post-war socioeconomic and political characteristics, to instrumental variable estimations based on terrain ruggedness, and to restricting the sample to voters who were too young to be selectively targeted. Distinguishing between civilian and military victims, we show that violence against civilians drives the negative effect. Next, we examine different mediating mechanisms including forced migration and demographic selection, ethnic composition, physical capital damage, post-conflict reconstruction, and labor market conditions. Our results support the hypothesis that violence affects voting through a “moral” dis-utility from showing allegiance to politics and the society by casting a vote. Using survey data, we show that respondents in more affected municipalities report lower generalized trust, trust in institutions, and voting.     

Bandwagons and Momentum in Sequential Voting

In this paper I show that an equilibrium exists to the sequential voting game in which a bandwagon begins with probability 1. These bandwagons are driven by a combination of beliefs and the desire of voters to vote for the winning candidate. Significantly, in this equilibrium the pivot probability for each voter is non-zero, even in an infinite population. Consequently, the bandwagons do not always start after one (or at most two) favourable decisions (as do economic cascades) and varying levels of informative voting are observed, consistent with observations from sequential voting in U.S. presidential primaries. Further, voters are exposed to counterintuitive incentives, referred to as "buyers' remorse", that have been attributed to real primary voters.
I also derive equilibrium behaviour in this environment when voting is simultaneous and compare the quality of information aggregation within each mechanism. I relate the conclusions to U.S. presidential primaries and find they are consistent with a common conclusion about the front-loading of the primary process: that in tight elections (with no front-runner) simultaneous voting is preferred, whereas in lopsided elections sequential voting is preferred. The superior performance of sequential voting in lopsided races is precisely because bandwagons occur.     

Coordinated voting in sequential and simultaneous elections: some experimental evidence

This paper studies a situation wherein a set of voters choose between two alternatives in the presence of a payoff externality. Specifically, regardless of her intrinsic preference, a voter’s payoff is maximized should she vote for the alternative that garners a majority of the votes cast. Are votes coordinated on a single alternative? Using laboratory experiments, we examine voting patterns in sequential voting and simultaneous voting elections. Across both election types, we also vary the amount of information that an individual voter has regarding the intrinsic preferences of the other voters. Our main findings are as follows. In the “low” information treatment, sequential voting elections facilitate coordinated voting. However, in the “high” information treatment, voting patterns are not dependent on how the election is structured.     

Would letting people vote for multiple candidates yield policy moderation?

We investigate whether letting people vote for multiple candidates would yield policy moderation. We do so in a setting that takes three key features of elections into account, namely, strategic voting, endogenous candidacy and policy motivation on the part of the candidates. We consider two classes of voting rules. One class consists of the voting rules where each voter casts several equally-weighed votes for the different candidates. The other class consists of the voting rules where each voter rank-orders the candidates. We identify conditions under which these voting rules yield policy moderation. We also show that these voting rules may yield policy extremism instead of policy moderation if one (or several) of the conditions is not satisfied! Finally, we find that amongst these voting rules the extent of policy moderation is maximal under the Borda Count if we consider only equilibria where all candidates are serious contenders. However, this result does not carry over to spoiler equilibria, where Approval Voting can yield more moderate policy outcomes than the Borda Count.     

An experimental test of a committee search model

The objective of this paper is to design a laboratory experiment for an infinite-horizon sequential committee search model in order to test some of the implications obtained by the model in Albrecht et al. (2010) (AAV). We find that, compared with single-agent search, the search duration is longer for committee search under the unanimity rule, but is shorter for committee search in which at least one vote is required to stop searching. In addition, according to estimates from round-based search decisions, subjects are more likely to vote to stop searching in committee search than in single-agent search. This confirms that agents are less picky in committee search. Overall, the experimental outcomes are consistent with the implications suggested by the AAV model. However, despite the prediction from the AAV model, we could not obtain a significant outcome in relation to the size order of the probabilities of voting to stop searching in committee search for the various plurality voting rules.     

RETROSPECTIVE VOTING AND PARTY POLARIZATION

We provide a new and favorable perspective on voter naiveté and party polarization. We contrast sophisticated (Nash) versus retrospective voting in a model where two parties commit to policies. Retrospective voters do not understand the mapping between states and outcomes induced by a policy; instead, they simply vote for the party that delivers the highest observed performance, as determined in equilibrium. We show that parties have an incentive to polarize under retrospective, compared to Nash, voting. Moreover, this polarization often results in higher welfare due to a better match between policies and fundamentals.     

Tiebout and redistribution in a model of residential and political choice

The paper considers a two-community model with freely mobile individuals. Individuals differ not only in their incomes, but also in their tastes for a local public good. In each jurisdiction, the amount of public services is determined by majority vote of the inhabitants, and local spending is financed by a residence-based linear income tax. When making their residential and political choices, individuals thus face a trade-off between the provisionary and redistributive effects of policies. We analyze this trade-off and show that Tiebout-like sorting equilibria often exist. If the spread in tastes among individuals is very large, an almost perfect sorting according to preferences emerges; otherwise, a partial sorting prevails and stratification into rich and poor communities is more pronounced. Importantly, we demonstrate that all these sorting equilibria exist whether or not individuals are allowed to relocate after voting.