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.     

Voting by Successive Elimination and Strategic Candidacy

We study the impact of strategic choices of self-interested candidates of whether or not to enter an election. We focus on strategic candidacy in the context of the tree and binary voting procedures used by small groups such as committees. We offer a comprehensive analysis for the special but important case of voting by successive elimination. Strategic candidacy slightly enlarges the set of candidates that can be equilibrium outcomes relative to the traditional analysis which takes the set of candidates as fixed. Pareto-dominated candidates can be elected in equilibrium under voting by successive elimination when strategic candidacy is considered, in contrast with a fixed set of candidates. Journal of Economic Litterature Classification Numbers: D71, D72.     

Size approval voting

We propose a new class of voting procedures, called Size Approval Voting, according to which, the effective weight of a vote from a given individual depends on how many other candidates that individual votes for. In particular, weights are assumed to be non-negative and weakly decreasing in the number of approved candidates. Then, for a given profile of individual votes, all candidates with the maximal sum of weighted votes are elected. We show in our axiomatic analysis that the family of all Size Approval Voting procedures is characterized by a set of natural properties.     

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.     

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 REVELATION OF INFORMATION THROUGH THE ELECTORAL PROCESS: AN EXPLORATORY ANALYSIS*

This paper investigates the incentives for candidates to make informative campaign speeches concerning their policy intentions. Electoral competition is modeled as a game of communication in which candidates’policy preferences are private information and they compete by making pre-electoral policy announcements. An equilibrium is shown to exist in which candidates reveal their true policy intentions. We find that campaign messages are more likely to be informative, the less powerful is the elected office, the more attractive are candidates’opportunities outside of office, and the more uniform are candidates’prior beliefs as to the median voter's preferred policy.     

Can television bring down a dictator? Evidence from Chile’s “No” campaign

Can televised political advertising change voting behavior in elections held in authoritarian regimes? We study the case of Chile, where the opposition used television campaigns weeks before the election that ended the seventeen-year dictatorship known as the Pinochet regime. Using national surveys conducted before the election and administrative electoral data, we provide evidence of a positive effect of television exposure on opposition votes. When compared to similar estimates in democracies, the effect of campaigns in Chile appear large. These results suggest that televised political campaigns can help to defeat dictators at the polls.     

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.     

Counterexamples on the Superiority of Approval versus Plurality

We present a simple voting environment with three candidates where the Condorcet winner exists. Under plurality rule, the derived game has a stable set where such a candidate is elected with probability one. However, no stable set of the approval game elects the Condorcet winner with positive probability. We also analyze the robustness of such an example to changes in the number of voters and their preferences. To conclude, we present a generic four‐candidate voting environment with the same properties.     

Promising politicians,rational voters,and election outcomes

Overwhelming anecdotal evidence suggests that politicians often promise more during an election campaign than they are willing or able to deliver once elected. In this paper, we present two signaling models to explain this phenomenon. In the first model, two candidates maximize their share of the vote. In the second model both try to convince the median voter. In each model, candidates rationally distort their true policy position. Voters, however, are not fooled. Upon observing election promises, they can rationally infer the true position of each candidate. Hence, the election outcome is not affected.JEL Classification: D72, D82The author thanks Peter Kooreman, Wilko Letterie, Bert Schoonbeek, and two anonymous referees for useful comments. Financial support from The Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) is gratefully acknowledged.     

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.     

Vote buying and campaign promises

What explains the wide variation across countries in the use of vote buying and policy promises during election campaigns? We address this question, and account for a number of stylized facts and apparent anomalies regarding vote buying, using a model in which parties cannot fully commit to campaign promises. We find that high vote buying is associated with frequent reneging on campaign promises, strong electoral competition, and high policy rents. Frequent reneging and low party competence reduce campaign promises. If vote buying can be financed out of public resources, incumbents buy more votes and enjoy an electoral advantage, but they also promise more public goods. Vote buying has distributional consequences: voters targeted with vote buying pre-election may receive no government benefits post-election. The results point to obstacles to the democratic transition from clientelist to programmatic forms of electoral competition: parties may not benefit electorally from institutions that increase commitment.     

Rational Abstention and the Congressional Vote Choice

Research on voting, particularly on legislative behavior, tends to focus on the choices of those casting ballots. Yet, intuitively, abstentions and vote choice should be jointly determined. As such, the relevance of participation depends upon both the extent to which it can be explained by the costs and the benefits of voting and on the nature of the interactions between participation and preferences. To this end, we provide a framework for explaining roll call behavior that simultaneously considers legislators' decisions about whether and how to vote. Application to roll call voting in the 104th Congress finds that abstention and voting choices are integrated; our approach generates sensible and substantively important results which yield important insights into legislative behavior and public policy.     

Can biased polls distort electoral results? Evidence from the lab

We introduce a new methodological approach for studying the effect of biased polls on election outcomes and apply it to a set of new experiments with 375 participants. Voters may observe and learn about the bias by playing multiple voting rounds. While in control conditions, polls are unbiased, in treatment conditions, participants view only poll results where a particular candidate’s vote share is the largest. This candidate is consistently elected more often in the treatments than in the controls, because biased polls robustly distort voters’ expectations about vote shares. This effect holds after eighteen election rounds, out of which the first three are practice rounds, but somewhat more weakly in our main treatment where voters are explicitly informed about the bias.     

Voting under ignorance of job skills of unemployed: the overtaxation bias

Usual models on voting over basic income–flat tax schedules rest on the assumption that voters know the whole distribution of skills even if at equilibrium some individuals do not work. If individuals’ productivity remains unknown until they work, it may be more convincing to assume that voters have only beliefs about the distribution of skills and that a learning process takes place. In this paper, at each period, individuals vote according to their beliefs which are updated when getting new information from the job market. The voting process converges towards some steady-state equilibrium that depends on both the true distribution of skills and the initial beliefs. The equilibrium tax rate is higher than (or equal to) the tax rate achieved in the perfect information framework. An illustration is provided on French data: if voters are over-pessimistic as to the potential productivity of unemployed people, majority voting may lock the economy in an “informational trap” with a high tax rate and a high level of inactivity.     

民主制度的责任视角:一个基本模型

竞争性民主是现代民主制度的主要实现方式。政治竞争的一些内在特征,包括选民"选择"行为特点、信息不对称以及候选人事前承诺不可置信等问题常常导致无效竞争。保证民主选举中竞争有效运行的关键在于存在保证竞选人在当选后的任期中会努力实现自己承诺的责任机制,从而提高事前承诺的可置信程度。文章通过一个简单的正式模型展示了这一点,进而尝试从选举机制、评价机制与声誉机制等方面初步探讨构建审责机制的可能路径。     

Set them (almost) free: Discretion in electoral campaigns under incomplete information

The paper analyzes a model of electoral campaigning as a problem of competitive delegation. We consider an environment characterized by two sources of uncertainty: uncertainty on the nature of the optimal policy and uncertainty on the candidates’ biases. Although voters know whether the candidate is left‐ or right‐wing, they do not know the extent of the bias. In this environment, discretion may benefit voters as it allows the elected politician to adjust his policies to the state of the world. The paper shows that the optimal set of promises must be a closed interval, whose size is decreasing in the expected bias of the candidate. An example where the set of types is finite shows that an increase in the variability of candidates’ types may either increase or decrease the voters’ willingness to grant discretion to politicians.     

Mecro‐Economic Voting: Local Information and Micro‐Perceptions of the Macro‐Economy

We develop an incomplete information theory of economic voting, where voters' information about macro‐economic performance is determined by the economic conditions of people similar to themselves. We test our theory using both cross‐sectional and time‐series survey data. A novel survey instrument that asks respondents their numerical assessment of the unemployment rate confirms that individuals' economic information responds to the economic conditions of people similar to themselves. Furthermore, these assessments are correlated with individuals' vote choices. We also show in time‐series data that state unemployment robustly correlates with evaluations of national economic conditions, and presidential support.     

Dissertation abstract: Experiments on fairness and reputation

The three dissertation essays investigate different aspects of reputation in games where fairness is an important consideration. The first essay studies the effects of reputation on indirect reciprocity in different dictator games. The first experiment places dictators in two environments where they can either give money to the paired player or take money away from them: in one treatment the paired player is a stranger and in the other treatment the dictator has information on the paired player’s reputation. Contrary to anecdotal evidence, the statistical tests show that the dictators’ behavior towards a stranger is not statistically significantly different from their behavior towards an individual with an established reputation. The findings arise because a high proportion of dictators acted purely in their own self interest in both treatments. The data also provides evidence that dictators are more generous when they know that their choices (but not their identities) will be revealed in the future. In the second experiment the dictators’ choices were restricted to only generous actions. In such environment the dictators sent more money on average to recipients with a reputation for being generous than to recipients without a reputation. The second essay explores the ways in which information about others’ actions affects one’s own behavior in a dictator game. The experimental design discriminates behaviorally between three possible effects of recipient’s within-game reputation on the dictator’s decision: reputation causing indirect reciprocity, social influence, and identification. The separation of motives helps to identify the mechanisms of social transmission of impulses towards selfish or generous behavior. The data analysis reveals that the reputation effects have a stronger impact on dictators’ actions than social influence and identification. In the third essay¹ we examine the reputation effects in a labor market setting by analyzing the influence of negative technological shocks on long run relationships between firms and workers. The positive correlation between wage and effort in static conditions has been demonstrated in many experimental studies and has been one of the prominent explanations for the existence of wage rigidity. We subject these findings to further tests in a non-stationary environment that better corresponds to outside-the-lab market conditions. We observe the positive correlation of wages and effort but do not find support for downward wage rigidity in our data. Once the shocks occur, firms lower the wages and relationships often break down. The workers who accept a lower wage respond with exerting a lower effort. JEL Classification C70, C91, D63, D64 ¹Co-authored with Ninghua Du. Dissertation Committee: Dissertation Advisor: James C. Cox Martin Dufwenberg, Price V. Fishback, Ronald L. Oaxaca