Aggregating Information by Voting: The Wisdom of the Experts versus the Wisdom of the Masses

Abstract

This paper analyzes participation and information aggregation in a common-value election with continuous private signals. In equilibrium, some citizens ignore their private information and abstain from voting, in deference to those with higher-quality signals. Even as the number of highly-informed peers grows large, however, citizens with only moderate expertise continue voting, so that voter participation remains at realistic levels (e.g. 50% or 60%, for simple examples). The precise level of voter turnout, along with the margin of victory, are determined by the distribution of expertise. Improving a voter's information makes her more willing to vote, consistent with a growing body of empirical evidence, but makes her peers more willing to abstain, providing a new explanation for various empirical patterns of voting. Equilibrium participation is optimal, even though the marginal voter may have very little (e.g. below-average) expertise, and even though non-voters'information is not utilized.JEL Classi…cation Numbers: D72, D82

Wisdom of the Crowd? Information Aggregation and Electoral Incentives

“…Several important contributions in varied settings have shown that the electorate selects the right policy with probability approaching one as its size increases when faced with exogenous options (e.g., Feddersen and Pesendorfer, 1997;Wit, 1998;Myerson, 1998;McMurray, 2012;Acharya and Meirowitz, 2017). In particular, a sufficient condition, satisfied in our setting, is that the signal space has same cardinality as the exogenous policy space (Barelli et al, 2017).…”

Ideology as Opinion: A Spatial Model of Common-Value Elections

“…As in McMurray (2013), one way to understand how aggregating additional signals could reduce the quality of the electoral decision is to note that the decision of whether to vote or abstain conveys private information beyond the content of the vote itself; when voting is made mandatory, this additional information is lost. Ideally, each citizen's opinion would be utilized, but would be weighted according to its precision, as in Nitzan and Paroush (1982) and Shapley and Grofman (1984).…”

“…A formal treatment of large elections is beyond the scope of this paper, but it seems reasonable in this pure common-value setting to conjecture that abstention should remain substantial no matter how large the electorate grows. For the case of symmetric platforms and binary truth, at least, abstention actually increases with n -but also remains bounded so that turnout and abstention remain substantial in large elections (see McMurray 2013). In that sense, empirical evidence of strategic abstention suggests that voter utility not only includes, but is actually dominated by, a commonly-valued component.…”

Mandate and paternalism: A theory of large elections

“…There are also information aggregation voting models that analyze voters' participation. See McMurray (2013). 5 E.g., see Taylor and Yildirim (2010).…”