Electoral Thresholds as Coordination Devices

In this paper, we study one‐person–one‐vote parliamentary elections where voters care both about the winner of elections and about the composition of the parliament. Parties enter the parliament if and only if their vote share exceeds some predetermined threshold. We show that equilibria generically exist in which all parties obtain a non‐degenerate vote‐share and, perhaps more importantly, we show that the size of the electoral threshold acts as a coordination device, which crucially affects the win prospects of the Condorcet winner party. In particular, we argue that the win prospects of the Condorcet winner party decrease with the size of the entry threshold.     

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 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.     

Higher turnout increases incumbency advantages: Evidence from mayoral elections

We analyze the effect of electoral turnout on incumbency advantages by exploring mayoral elections in the German state of Bavaria. Mayors are elected by majority rule in two-round (runoff) elections. Between the first and second ballot of the mayoral election in March 2020, the state government announced an official state of emergency. In the second ballot, voting in person was prohibited and only postal voting was possible. To construct an instrument for electoral turnout, we use a difference-in-differences strategy by contrasting turnout in the first and second ballot in 2020 with the first and second ballots from previous elections. We use this instrument to analyze the causal effect of turnout on incumbent vote shares. A 10-percentage point increase in turnout leads to a statistically robust 3.4 percentage point higher vote share for incumbent mayors highlighting the relevance of turnout-related incumbency advantages.     

Voter turnout and the principle of ‘one person,one vote’: empirical evidence from the constituency freeze in India

This article uses panel data from national and state elections in India during the period 1977–2007 to examine the effect of inequality in constituency population size on voter turnout. During this period, constituency boundaries in India remained fixed. As a result, differences in population size between constituencies increased, thus changing the value of a single vote. Using this large variation in population size and informative data, this article carefully distinguishes the effect of population size from other factors. We find that an increase of one million electorates decreases voter turnout by 12–27%. In addition, we find that the share of votes gained by national political parties is greater in small-population constituencies. This suggests that political parties direct their efforts in electoral campaigns preferentially to less populous constituencies; as a result, voters in small constituencies are more likely to participate in elections.     

Victory margins and the paradox of voting

This paper addresses a simple question: why do people vote? Though simple, this question remains unanswered despite the considerable attention it has received. In this paper, I show that purely rational–instrumental factors explain a large fraction of turnout variations, provided that the effect of the margin of victory on implemented policy is considered. I extend Myerson's models of elections based on Poisson games, and show that, when platforms are responsive to vote shares, the predictions of the model become consistent with several stylized facts, including the secular fall in turnout rates in the US.     

Party Control of State Government and the Distribution of Public Expenditures*

This paper examines the effects of party control of state governments on the distribution of intergovernmental transfers across counties from 1957 to 1997. We find that the governing parties skew the distribution of funds in favor of areas that provide them with the strongest electoral support. This is borne out in two ways. (i) Counties that traditionally give the highest vote share to the governing party receive larger shares of state transfers to local governments. (ii) When control of the state government changes, the distribution of funds shifts in the direction of the new governing party. We find only weak evidence that parties reward electorally pivotal counties or counties in electorally pivotal legislative districts. Finally, we find that increased spending in a county increases voter turnout in subsequent elections. This suggests that parties have an electoral incentive to skew the distribution of funds to influence future election results, and the mechanism through which this works is “mobilization” rather than “conversion” of voters in a fixed electorate.     

Economic insecurity,racial anxiety,and right-wing populism

This paper studies the roles of economic insecurity (EI) and attitudes to racial inequality as predictors of voting patterns in the 2016 US election. Using data from the 2016 Voter Survey, we show that both perceptions of EI and concerns over anti-White discrimination are significant correlates of Republican support. Effect sizes on racial attitudes are much larger than those found on EI, although the effects of insecurity become larger when accounting for both short-term and long-term economic stress. We also show there is very little heterogeneity in the effects of insecurity across racial groups—both Whites and minorities are more likely to vote Republican when experiencing short-term insecurity. Our results suggest that policies that mitigate micro-level economic risk may lessen support for populist political candidates.     

Majority rule when voters like to win

I analyze symmetric majority rule voting equilibria when voters wish to elect the better candidate and to vote for the winner. When voters care only about the winning candidate (the standard formulation) a unique responsive equilibrium exists. The addition of a desire to win creates multiple equilibria, some with unusual properties. In most of these equilibria information is not aggregated effectively, and I uncover the novel possibility of negative information aggregation in which information aggregated in equilibrium is used to select the worse rather than the better candidate.I then characterize the efficiency of optimal equilibria as the population becomes large and show that a discontinuity arises in the information aggregation capabilities of the majority rule voting mechanism: in elections without a dominant front-running candidate the better candidate is almost surely elected, whereas in races with a front-runner information cannot be effectively aggregated in equilibrium.     

The effect of presidential election outcomes on alcohol drinking

The growing political polarization and the increasing use of social media have been linked to straining social ties worldwide. The 2016 presidential elections in the United States reflected this trend with reports of fear and anxiety among voters. We examine how election results can be linked to episodes of anxiety through the use of alcohol as self-medication. We analyze a daily dataset of household purchases of alcohol in the weeks following presidential elections. We find that, within 30 days from Election Day, a 10 percentage point increase in support for the losing candidate increases alcohol expenditure by 1.1%. The effect is driven by counties with a higher share of supporters of the losing candidate and is robust to controlling more flexibly for omitted variables related to alcohol consumption. The increase in alcohol consumption is present in the 2016 elections and absent in the previous three presidential elections.     

The Effect of Political Alignment on Transfers to Portuguese Municipalities

I investigate if political alignment between central and local governments brings financial benefit to local governments, using financial data from Portuguese municipalities (1992–2005). I use regression discontinuity design to determine the effect of political alignment per se on transfers to municipalities. Municipalities aligned with the central government receive 19% more targetable transfers than unaligned municipalities. I test for electoral motivation of this transfer bias: extra transfers increase the vote share of incumbents in local elections for one of the two Portuguese major parties; however, municipal incumbency does not lead to better results in national elections.     

A Positive Theory of Social Security

In many countries, social security accounts for a large fraction of the government budget. Why is this so, given that at any point in time the number of recipients of social security benefits is smaller than the number of contributors? In the overlapping‐generations model studied in this paper, all individuals currently alive vote on social security in every period. In equilibrium, the size of social security is larger, the greater is the proportion of elderly people in the population, and the greater is the inequality of pre‐tax income within each generation. Both predictions of the theory are supported by the empirical evidence in cross‐country data.     

Workers’ remittances and government size

In this paper I use a panel of 133 developing countries for the period 1972 to 2012 to estimate the effect of workers’ remittances on the size of government. Controlling for country and period fixed effects that jointly affect workers’ remittances and government size, the paper finds that workers’ remittances are associated with larger government. The paper further examines whether democratic institutions mediate the relationship between workers’ remittances and government size. Democratic institutions do not significantly mediate the effect that workers’ remittances have on the size of government.     

Natural disasters and electoral outcomes

Natural disasters are good examples of catastrophic events that may affect vote decisions. In this study, we analyze how the occurrence of earthquakes changes voters' behavior at municipal elections and which channels drive this change, focusing in particular on the role of media exposure. We exploit data from 13,338 municipal electoral cycles where incumbents seek reelection between 1993 and 2015 in Italy. We apply a difference-in-difference strategy with time and cities fixed effect to the probability of reelection and vote share using three different control groups: the universe of municipalities, a sub-sample of neighboring municipalities, and a sub-sample of municipalities identified by a one-to-one nearest-neighbor propensity score matching procedure. We find that the occurrence of destructive earthquakes significantly increases the incumbent mayors’ chance of being reelected and their vote share. We argue that this result is driven by the incumbent mayor advantage in offering recovery from disaster damages combined with a higher visibility on the media in the aftermath of the disaster. Thus, the mediatic relevance of earthquake occurrence may bias voters towards the incumbent.     

The effects of earmarks on the likelihood of reelection

Many models predict that incumbent legislators use government spending – “pork barrel” spending – to increase their vote shares in elections. To date, however, evidence for this hypothesis is scarce. Using recently available data on the sponsorship of earmarks in U.S. appropriations legislation, this paper tests the effects of earmarks on the likelihood of legislators' reelection. The results show that secured earmarks lead to higher vote shares. The analysis demonstrates that a $10 million increase in earmarks leads to as much as a one percentage point increase in vote share on election day. Furthermore, the paper tests for voter responses to earmarks when earmarks have few or many sponsors.     

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 power of social mobilisation: The impact of monitoring the 2015 presidential elections in Poland

In recent years we have observed an increased engagement of citizen’s movements with elections in democratic polities. Yet our understanding of the influence that this engagement can have over elections is still rather limited. In this paper we study electoral consequences of citizens’ involvement in monitoring 2015 presidential elections in Poland. Our analysis provides strong support for arguments saying that watchdog organisations may have an important influence on electoral outcomes. Our findings suggest that in municipalities in which election observers were present the share of vote for an incumbent candidate, Bronis?aw Komorowski, was significantly lower than in municipalities where the watchdog organisation did not have its representatives. Our results are robust to several tests which allows us to argue that the effect we find should not be attributed to some unobservable factors.     

Mortgage market credit conditions and U.S. Presidential elections

Voters punish incumbent Presidential candidates for contractions in the county-level supply of mortgage credit during market-wide contractions of credit, but do not reward them for expansions in mortgage credit supply in boom times. Our primary focus is the Presidential election of 2008, which followed an unprecedented swing from very generous mortgage underwriting standards to a severe contraction of mortgage credit. Voters responded to the credit crunch by shifting their support away from the Republican Presidential candidate in 2008. That shift was large and particularly pronounced in states that typically vote Republican, and in swing states. Without it McCain would have received half the votes needed in nine crucial swing states to reverse the outcome of the election. We extend our analysis to the Presidential elections from 1996 to 2012 and find that voters only react to contractions, not expansions, of credit, and reactions are similar for Democratic and Republican incumbent parties.     

Coattails and the forces that drive them: Evidence from Mexico

Coattails and the forces behind them have important implications for the understanding of electoral processes and their outcomes. By focusing our attention on neighboring electoral sections that face the same local congressional election, but different municipal elections, and assuming that political preferences for local legislative candidates remain constant across neighboring electoral sections, we exploit variation in the strength of the municipal candidates in each of these electoral sections to estimate coattails from municipal to local congressional elections in Mexico. A one percentage increase in vote share for a municipal candidate translates, depending on his or her party, into an average of between 0.45 and 0.78 percentage point increase in vote share for the legislative candidates from the same party (though this effect may not have been sufficient to affect an outcome in any electoral district in our sample). In addition, we find that a large fraction of the effect is driven by individuals switching their vote decision in the legislative election, rather than by an increase in turnout.     

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.