Informational roles of pre-election polls

This paper introduces a pre-election polling stage to Feddersen and Pesendorfer's two-candidate election model in which some voters are uncertain about the state of the world. While Feddersen and Pesendorfer find that less informed, indifferent voters strictly prefer abstention, which they refer to as the swing voter's curse, I show that there exists an equilibrium in which everyone truthfully reveals his or her preference in the pre-election poll and participates in voting. Moreover, even in the truth-telling equilibrium, the candidate who leads in the poll may lose the election. However, polls can help elections aggregate information more successfully.     

Lobbying,political competition and the welfare effect of campaign contribution tax

This paper develops a probabilistic voting model in which a single lobby group commits campaign contributions to parties, contingent on the policy position the party adopts. Parties may have different propensities for diverting campaign funds towards rents. We show that a party that skims more from contributions mobilises fewer uninformed voters but places more value on receiving greater contributions. Further, the contributions and vote share of the party increases with the distance between the lobby's preferred policy and the median voter's ideal policy. Finally, we show that the equilibrium policy is between the median voter's ideal point and the lobby's preferred policy. Such an equilibrium policy does not maximise the aggregate social welfare due to the distortionary nature of lobbying. However, when an appropriate contribution tax is introduced to limit this distortion, social welfare will be maximised.     

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.     

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.     

Divided government versus incumbency externality effect—Quasi-experimental evidence on multiple voting decisions

This paper explores the causal relationship between vote outcomes in different elections. We ask: (1) Does the partisan identity of the mayor influence the voter's decision in subsequent town council elections? (2) Do voters condition their vote for the mayor on the result of the last council election? The analysis mainProd. Type: FLPly relies on a regression discontinuity design focusing on close election outcomes based on municipal level data for Germany. We find that the party of the mayor can receive a significant bonus in the next town council election. Moreover, voters punish mayor candidates of parties that performed strongly in earlier council elections. Throughout the paper, we highlight how these findings can be related to an incumbency externality effect and to the theory of divided government.     

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.     

SEARCH BEHAVIOR OF ASYMMETRICALLY INFORMED VOTERS: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY*

This paper experimentally investigates individual level search within a spatial election model. In our model the voter is required to cast a ballot for one of two candidates. However, the voter's task is made non-trivial since, even though the location of one candidate is known, the location of a second candidate is unknown. To reduce uncertainty regarding the unknown candidate's location, the voter may undertake an information search. We find that search in this environment is a function of the cost of search, the quality of information, and the voter's location on the issue space.     

A Psychologically Based Model of Voter Turnout

We analyze a psychologically based model of voter turnout. Potential voters experience regret if they fail to vote, which is the motivation for participation in voting. Regret from abstention is inversely related to the margin of victory. Voters on the winner's side experience less regret than those on the loser's side. We show that the unique equilibrium involves positive voter turnout. We show that the losing side has higher turnout. In addition, voter turnout is positively related to importance of the election and the competitiveness of the election. We also consider scenarios in which voters are uncertain about the composition of the electorate's political preferences and show similar phenomena emerge.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

ECONOMIC VOTING AND ELECTORAL BEHAVIOR: HOW DO INDIVIDUAL,LOCAL, AND NATIONAL FACTORS AFFECT THE PARTISAN CHOICE?

What impact do income and other demographic factors have on a voter's partisan choice? Using post‐election surveys of 14,000 voters in 10 Australian elections between 1966 and 2001, I explore the impact that individual, local, and national factors have on voters' decisions. In these 10 elections, the poor, foreign‐born, younger voters, voters born since 1950, men, and those who are unmarried are more likely to be left‐wing. Over the past 35 years, the partisan gap between men and women has closed, but the partisan gap has widened on three dimensions: between young and old; between rich and poor; and between native‐born and foreign‐born. At a neighborhood level, I find that, controlling for a respondent's own characteristics, and instrumenting for neighborhood characteristics, voters who live in richer neighborhoods are more likely to be right‐wing, while those in more ethnically diverse or unequal neighborhoods are more likely to be left‐wing. Controlling for incumbency, macroeconomic factors do not seem to affect partisan preferences – Australian voters apparently regard both major parties as equally capable of governing in booms and busts.     

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.     

Local equilibrium equivalence in probabilistic voting models

Electoral equilibria depend upon candidates' motivations. Maximization of expected vote share may not lead to the same behavior as maximization of the probability of winning the election. Accordingly, it is desirable to understand when electoral equilibria are insensitive to the choice of candidate motivations. This paper examines sufficient conditions for local equilibrium equivalence between expected vote share maximization and maximization of probability of victory in the spatial model of elections with probabilistic voters.     

Pivots versus signals in elections

We consider a two-period model of elections in which voters have private information about their policy preferences. A first-period vote can have two types of consequences: it may be pivotal in the first election and it provides a signal that affects candidates' positions in the second election. Pivot events are exceedingly unlikely, but when they occur the effect of a single vote is enormous. In contrast, vote totals always have some signaling effect, but the effect of a single vote is small. We investigate which effect - pivot or signaling - drives equilibrium voting behavior in large electorates.     

The Endurance and Eclipse of the Controlled Vote: A Formal Model of Vote Brokerage Under the Secret Ballot

Throughout much of mankind's experience with elections, vote brokers – local elites who direct the voting decisions of a subset of the electorate – have been able to make or break political careers. In various polities, brokers have thrived in spite of the secret ballot, a surprising outcome given that vote secrecy would ostensibly allow citizens to pocket the inducements offered by such individuals and vote their consciences anyway. To address this puzzle, we develop a framework for understanding the persistence and demise of vote brokerage under the secret ballot. In our model, a broker contracts with voters using an outcome contingent contract: some fixed benefit is promised to all voters sharing one of several observable profiles should the broker's candidate win the election. Using this framework, we demonstrate that the existence of brokerage depends on the size of the electorate contained within the jurisdiction controlled by the broker, with large jurisdiction sizes tending to drive brokerage out of existence. Moreover, we detail the manner in which the strategies employed by brokers depend on their economic power, the size of social groups, and ideological polarization. Empirical evidence from Minas Gerais, Brazil is used to evaluate the performance of the model.     

Let the experts decide? Asymmetric information,abstention, and coordination in standing committees

We examine abstention when voters in standing committees are asymmetrically informed and there are multiple pure-strategy equilibria – swing voterʼs curse (SVC) equilibria where voters with low-quality information abstain and equilibria when all participants vote their information. When the asymmetry in information quality is large, we find that voting groups largely coordinate on the SVC equilibrium which is also Pareto optimal. However, we find that when the asymmetry in information quality is not large and the Pareto optimal equilibrium is for all to participate, significant numbers of voters with low-quality information abstain. Furthermore, we find that information asymmetry induces voters with low-quality information to coordinate on a non-equilibrium outcome. This suggests that coordination on “letting the experts” decide is a likely voting norm that sometimes validates SVC equilibrium predictions but other times does not.     

How to win a large election

We consider the optimization problem of a campaign trying to win an election when facing aggregate uncertainty, where agentsʼ voting probabilities are uncertain. Even a small amount of uncertainty will in a large electorate eliminate many of counterintuitive results that arise when voting probabilities are known. In particular, a campaign that can affect the voting probabilities of a fraction of the electorate should maximize the expected difference between its candidateʼs and the opposing candidateʼs share of the fractionʼs potential vote. When a campaign can target only finitely many voters, maximization of the same objective function remains optimal if a convergence condition is satisfied. When voting probabilities are certain, this convergence condition obtains only at knife-edge combinations of parameters, but when voting probabilities are uncertain the condition is necessarily satisfied.     

INFORMATION AND THE BEAUTY PREMIUM IN POLITICAL ELECTIONS

We use data on 800 candidates from the 2012 U.S. election cycle in U.S. and state congressional races to examine the degree to which beauty affects electoral outcomes. We find that a candidate that is one standard deviation more beautiful receives a 1.1 percentage point higher vote share and is 6.0 percentage points more likely to win the election. This beauty premium is larger in situations where voters are less likely to have more information about the candidate. The beauty premium is much smaller for U.S. congressional races than for state congressional races, and is also much smaller for incumbent candidates. In addition, we find a correlation that the beauty premium is lower when a candidate spends more money on the election. (JEL D72, J70)