On Public Opinion Polls and Voters' Turnout

Abstract

Abstract:This paper studies the e¤ects that the revelation of information on the electorate's preferences has on voters'turnout decisions. The experimental data show that closeness in the division of preferences induces a signi…cant increase in turnout. Moreover, for closely divided electorates (and only for these electorates) the provision of information signi…cantly raises the participation of subjects supporting the slightly larger team relative to the smaller team. We show that the heterogeneous e¤ect of information on the participation of subjects in di¤erent teams is driven by the subjects' (incorrect) beliefs of casting a pivotal vote. Simply put, subjects overestimate the probability of casting a pivotal vote when they belong to the team with a slight majority, and choose the strategy that maximizes their utility based on their in ‡ated probability assessment. Empirical evidence on gubernatorial elections in the U.S. between 1990 and 2005 is consistent with our main experimental result. Namely, we observe that the di¤erence in the actual vote tally between the party leading according to the polls and the other party is larger than the one predicted by the polls only in closely divided electorates. We provide a behavioral model that explains the main …ndings of our experimental and empirical analyses.