Choosing an Electoral Rule: Values and Self-Interest in the Lab

Abstract

Citizens are increasingly involved in the design of democratic institutions, for instance via referendums. If they support the institution that best serves their self-interest, the outcome inevitably advantages the largest group and disadvantages minorities. In this paper, we challenge this pessimistic view with an original lab experiment in France and Great Britain. In the first phase, experimental subjects experience elections under plurality and approval voting. In the second phase, they decide which rule they want to use for extra elections. The treatment is whether they do or do not have information to determine where their self-interest lies before deciding. We find that self-interest shapes people’s decisions, but so do intrinsic egalitarian values that subjects have outside of the lab. The implications are: (1) people have consistent ‘value-driven preferences’ for electoral rules, and (2) putting them in a situation of uncertainty leads to an outcome that reflects these values.

What Kind of Electoral Outcome do People Think is Good for Democracy?

“…Third, a few studies are based on experiments, in which the researchers present a set of alternative political institutions to citizens before asking them which one they prefer (Bol et al, 2020;Engelman et al, 2020;Hoffmann and Renes, 2021;Plescia et al, 2020). These studies offer a solution to the problems associated with the two other types of studies presented above: (1) they propose a clear choice to respondents between alternative institutions, and (2) put them "behind a veil of ignorance" in the sense that these subjects cannot know which rule will benefit them or their favorite party.…”