Psychologically-based voting with uncertainty

We analyse a psychologically-based model of voter turnout in an election with common value and uncertainty about who the best candidate is. Potential voters' behaviour is based on anticipated regret, where voters will experience regret if they fail to vote or vote for the wrong candidate. Furthermore, such regret is stronger when the margin of victory is smaller. We characterize mixed and pure-strategy equilibria, which can be desirable, where the right candidate is always elected in all states, or undesirable, where the wrong candidate is elected in some state. Our model yields distinctive comparative statics results. First, an increase in the proportion of informed citizens may cause the winning margin for the right candidate to either rise or fall, depending on the type of equilibrium. In addition, such an increase can have a non-monotonic effect on turnout of uninformed citizens. Second, as the prior becomes more favourable towards the ex ante favoured candidate, turnouts of informed and uninformed voters both change in a non-monotonic way. Furthermore, total turnout can be positively or negatively correlated with winning margins. The distinctive implications of our model could be tested using experimental or empirical studies. In addition, given its inclusion of uncertainty, our model can be used to study, in future research, information provision and acquisition as well as other policy questions.     

Election frequency,choice fatigue,and voter turnout

Influential scholars have argued that frequent elections lead to voter fatigue and can therefore be directly responsible for low turnout in countries characterized by frequent contests. However, other theories predict that frequent elections can even increase turnout. The existing empirical evidence is problematic as it simply correlates election frequency with turnout. By contrast, I exploit a natural experiment in the German state of Hesse, where voters from different municipalities faced the same electoral contest but experienced different election frequency, due to the staggered timing of some local elections. I find that when two elections are scheduled within a relatively short period of time, voter turnout at the later election is significantly reduced. This effect is stronger when the election is deemed less important in the eyes of the voters. Election frequency thus might also partly explain the wide turnout gap between first- and second-order elections, as suggested by Lijphart (1997).     

Damaging democracy? Security provision and turnout in Afghan elections†

In emerging democracies, elections are encouraged as a route to democratization. However, not only does violence often threaten these elections, but citizens often view as corrupt the security forces deployed to combat violence. We examine the effects of such security provision. In Afghanistan's 2010 parliamentary election, polling centers with similar histories of pre‐election violence unintentionally received different deployments of the Afghan National Police, enabling identification of police's effects on turnout. Using data from the universe of polling sites and various household surveys, data usually unavailable in conflict settings, we estimate increases in police presence decreased voter turnout by an average of 30%. Our results adjudicate between competing theoretical mechanisms through which security forces could affect turnout, and show behavior is not driven by voter anticipation of election‐day violence. This highlights a pitfall for building government legitimacy via elections in weakly institutionalized and conflict‐affected states.     

Exit polls,turnout, and bandwagon voting: Evidence from a natural experiment

We exploit a voting reform in France to estimate the causal effect of exit poll information on turnout and bandwagon voting. Before the change in legislation, individuals in some French overseas territories voted after the election result had already been made public via exit poll information from mainland France. We estimate that knowing the exit poll information decreases voter turnout by about 11 percentage points. Our study is the first clean empirical design outside of the laboratory to demonstrate the effect of such knowledge on voter turnout. Furthermore, we find that exit poll information significantly increases bandwagon voting; that is, voters who choose to turn out are more likely to vote for the expected winner.     

Learning in Elections and Voter Turnout

Voter turnout in game theoretic models of voting has typically been difficult to predict because of the problem of multiple Nash equilibria ( Palfrey and Rosenthal 1983, 1985 ). Many of these equilibria require an extreme precision of beliefs among voters that is unlikely to be reached in real elections. At the same time, mechanisms like pre‐election polls exist to shape the beliefs of voters about expected turnout. We combine these two features in a model of voter learning in elections and characterize the asymptotically stable equilibria of both complete and incomplete information games in a simple symmetric setting with two candidates. We also show how the model can be used to qualitatively explain several phenomena observed in reality: increases in costs of voting affect turnout adversely but there may be persistence of turnout levels between elections even though costs and other parameters change. Increase in uncertainty increases turnout while increases in the size of the electorate decrease it, in line with intuition.     

Indecision Theory: Weight of Evidence and Voting Behavior

In this paper, we show how to incorporate weight of evidence, or ambiguity, into a model of voting behavior. We do so in the context of the turnout decision of instrumentally rational voters who differ in their perception of the ambiguity of the candidates' policy positions. Ambiguity is reflected by the fact that the voter's beliefs are given by a set of probabilities, each of which represents in the voter's mind a different possible scenario. We show that a voter who is averse to ambiguity considers abstention strictly optimal when the candidates' policy positions are both ambiguous and they are “ambiguity complements.” Abstaining is preferred since it is tantamount to mixing the prospects embodied by the two candidates, thus enabling the voter to “hedge” the candidates' ambiguity.     

SEQUENTIAL VOTING WHEN LONG ELECTIONS ARE COSTLY

This paper analyzes sequential voting in binary elections when voters are motivated by a desire both to elect their preferred candidate and to avoid a long and costly election. I find a unique equilibrium in which a voter's action depends both on the intensity of the voter's preferences as well as how well the candidates have done in earlier voting rounds. This equilibrium results in momentum in which voters are more likely to vote for the candidate currently in the lead. Furthermore, the probability a voter votes for a candidate is increasing in the size of the candidate's lead. As a consequence, a candidate is more likely to win the election if the candidate's stronger supporters vote earlier in the election.     

Electoral fraud and voter turnout: An experimental study

In this paper we experimentally investigate the consequences of electoral fraud on voter turnout. The experiment is based on a strategic binary voting model where voters decide whether to cast a costly vote in favour of their preferred candidate or to abstain. The electoral process is illicitly influenced by applying ballot-box stuffing. In the experiment we implement two different framings: we compare voter turnout in a neutral environment and with framed instructions to explicitly replicate elections. This approach enables us to both test the model's predictions and to estimate the framing effects of voting and fraud. Comparison of experimental results with theoretical predictions reveals over-voting, which is exacerbated when fraud occurs. Turnout increases as predicted with a moderate level of fraud while, with higher levels of electoral fraud, voters fail to recognize that the existence of a relatively larger number of “agents” voting with certainty considerably decreases the benefits of voting. Importantly, framing matters, as revealed by the higher turnout of those in the majority group, against which the fraud is applied.     

Are voters rational?

We test whether a voter's decision to cast a vote depends on its probability of affecting the election outcome. Using exogenous variation arising at population cutoffs determining council sizes in Finnish municipal elections, we show that larger council size increases both pivotal probabilities and turnout. These effects are statistically significant, fairly large and robust. Finally, we use a novel instrumental variables design to show that the jumps in the pivotal probabilities are the likely candidate for explaining the increase in turnout, rather than the other observed simultaneous jumps at the council size cutoffs. Moreover, our results indicate that turnout responds only to within-party pivotal probabilities, perhaps because they are more salient to the voters than the between-party ones.     

A theory of self-fulfilling political expectations

In their pursuit of being re-elected, politicians might not choose high-quality policies but just conform to popular wisdom. The larger are the office spoils, and the more precise is an incumbent's knowledge of voter opinion, the more likely that she will resort to such populism. My main result is that the public's trust or distrust in politicians' behavior may be self-fulfilling. When voters assess the quality of an incumbent politician, they will compare her policy choices with their own prior opinion. If voters think that the incumbent was just trying to conform, a failure to do so will be even more damaging for the incumbent's election chances. However, this only increases the incumbent's incentives to conform, which indeed confirm voters' skepticism. Loosely put, a skeptic voter attitude tends to generate conformist politicians, while a trusting attitude tends to generate confident ones.     

Playing for Your Own Audience: Extremism in Two‐Party Elections

This paper considers a two‐party election with a single‐dimensional policy space. We assume that each voter has a higher probability of observing the position of the party he is affiliated with than the position of the other party, an assumption that is consistent with the National Election Studies (NES) electoral data set. In equilibrium, the two parties locate away from the median, because the voters who dislike a party's platform observe its policy choice with a lower probability, and its own audience like policy choices that cater to its taste. As the asymmetry in voter information or the cost of voting increases, the parties adopt more extreme platforms, while if there are fewer extreme voters the opposite effect occurs. Making voters more symmetrically informed about the two parties' platforms increases the welfare of society, while asymmetric information acquisition by the voters is worse than no information acquisition at all.     

Can money buy EU love?

We explore the role played by Cohesion Policy in the Brexit referendum and the subsequent 2017 general election. Although the UK has been a net contributor to the EU, some regions receive significant amounts of regional aid funds. We find that while Cohesion Policy is positively correlated with the remain vote, this relationship is weak. Most of the variation in the remain vote is explained by economic factors. In contrast, there is a robust negative correlation between Cohesion Policy and voter turnout. We estimate that had there not been this negative relationship, some 2 million more voters would have participated in the referendum, which is more than the winning margin between the remain and leave votes. Our analysis of the 2017 election suggests that Conservatives lost and Labour gained votes in the regions that benefited from Cohesion Policy, while remain-supporting regions showed gains for the Liberal Democrats.     

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.     

Dissertation abstract: Voting in the laboratory

Almost every week national elections are held somewhere in the world. Many more elections take place at federal and local levels of government. Surely, these are important events to many of us. This thesis aims at providing a better understanding of why and how people vote in elections. Three original modifications of Palfrey and Rosenthal’s (1983) participation game are used to study voter turnout theoretically and experimentally.¹ In the basic game, each voter supports (i.e., prefers) one of two exogenous candidates and privately decides between voting at a cost and abstaining (without costs). The candidate who receives more votes wins the election (ties are broken randomly) and each supporter of this candidate receives an equal reward, independent of whether or not she voted. The first study (published in the American Political Science Review 100, pp. 235–248) analyzes the effects of social embeddedness on turnout, assuming that voters may be influenced by observing the decisions of other voters around them (e.g., a family or working place). Our experimental results show that the social context matters: this information increases turnout by more than 50%. The increase is greater when neighbors support the same candidate rather than when they support opponents. The second study investigates the effects of public opinion polls on voter turnout and welfare. Poll releases resolve uncertainty about the level of support for each candidate caused by `floating’ voters, whose preferences change across elections. This information increases turnout in the laboratory by 28–34%, depending on the fraction of floating voters in the electorate. If polls indicate equal levels of support for both candidates—in which case aggregate benefits for society are not affected by the outcome—welfare decreases substantially due to costs from excessive turnout. In the final study, elections are preceded by the competition between two candidates: they simultaneously announce binding policy offers in which some voters can be favored at the expense of others through inclusion and exclusion in budget expenditure (Myerson 1993).² We observe that policy offers include 33% more voters—yielding a smaller budget share for each—when voting is compulsory rather than voluntary. Moreover, we find evidence of political bonds between voters and long-lived parties. Overall, in all three experiments many subjects strongly react to economic incentives (i.e., benefits, costs, and informational clues), often in line with what is observed outside of the laboratory. JEL Classification C72, C92, D72 Dissertation Committee: Arthur Schram, University of Amsterdam (advisor) Axel Ockenfels, University of Cologne Thomas Palfrey, California Institute of Technology Cees van der Eijk, University of Nottingham Frans van Winden, University of Amsterdam ¹Palfrey, T.R., & Rosenthal, H. (1983). A strategic calculus of voting. Public Choice, 41, 7–53. ²Myerson, R.B. (1993). Incentives to cultivate favored minorities under alternative electoral systems. American Political Science Review, 87, 856–869.     

Reciprocity and voting

In this paper we present a two-period model where a left-wing and a right-wing political party are solely interested in the policies they pursue. We assume that voters display reciprocal behavior. By contrast, political parties are not motivated by reciprocity. We show that reciprocity may have dramatic consequences for models of voting behavior. The incentive to be kind to the median voter may ensure that a position closer to the median voter's position is adopted even if political parties are not directly interested in being elected and cannot commit to a political stance during an election campaign. Moreover, reciprocity increases incumbency advantages.     

Get Out The Vote: How Encouraging Voting Changes Political Outcomes

How do measures to increase turnout affect election outcomes? I use a novel approach to analyze how these measures influence both voter turnout and the candidates' political positions. In general, lowering the net expense of voting reduces political polarization. If the net expense of voting is made very low, then candidates no longer have an incentive to take partisan positions to motivate turnout and will converge at the median voter's ideal point. For small changes in the net expense of voting, however, decreasing the cost of voting and penalties for not voting (two common measures) can result in drastically different political outcomes. Counter intuitively, measures that make voting cheaper might not increase turnout: since these measures decrease the difference between the candidates' political positions, they also decrease the benefit of voting.     

Welfare Reducing Polls

We study costly majority voting when voters rationally anticipate others have similar preferences. The correlation in preferences lowers expected turnout because votes have a positive externality on those who abstain. We study the effects of the public release of information (polls) on participation levels. Polls raise expected turnout but reduce expected welfare because they stimulate the “wrong” group to participate resulting in a “toss-up” election. Our novel results highlight the adverse effects of providing information about the electorate’s preferences and may explain why some countries bar opinion polls close to an election date.     

Term limit extension and electoral participation. Evidence from a diff-in-discontinuities design at the local level in Italy

We study the effect of term limits on voter turnout in Italian local elections. Since 2014 the Italian law allows mayors in municipalities with a population size lower than 3,000 inhabitants to re-run for a third term, whereas mayors in cities with a number of residents above the cut-off still face a two-term limit. The introduction of the reform permits us to implement a difference-in-discontinuities design exploiting the before/after with the discontinuous policy change. We find that voters negatively react to the introduction of the reform: electoral participation decreases by about 5 percentage points in municipalities eligible to the treatment compared to municipalities in the control group. This negative effect is essentially driven by a decrease in the political competition. We also find that relaxing term limits does not improve the quality of politicians running for election.     

Learning about challengers

We examine a political agency problem in repeated elections where an incumbent runs against a challenger from the opposing party, whose policy preferences are unknown by voters. We first ask: do voters benefit from attracting a pool of challengers with more moderate ideologies? When voters and politicians are patient, moderating the ideology distribution of centrist and moderate politicians (those close to the median voter) reduces voter welfare by reducing an extreme incumbent's incentives to compromise. We then ask: do voters benefit from informative signals about a challenger's true ideology? We prove that giving voters informative, but sufficiently noisy, signals always harm voters, because they make it harder for incumbents to secure re-election.     

Searching for the Downsian Voter with a Simple Structural Model

Studies of voter turnout consistently find that turnout responds to the closeness of the election, yet it is widely claimed that the probability of casting the deciding vote is too minute to be of consequence. We provide evidence on this puzzle by deriving a structural rational voting model in the form of a relatively simple regression equation, and fitting it to data from a large sample of US congressional elections.