Re-examining Voter Turnout in Large Elections

Abstract

A well-known shortcoming of rational voter models is that the equilibrium probability that an individual votes converges to zero as the population of citizens tends to infinity. We show that this does not -as is often suggested -imply that equilibrium voter turnout is insignificant in the limit. We characterize limiting equilibrium turnout and show that it may actually be arbitrarily large. Indeed, expected equilibrium turnout is shown to be closely approximated by 1/ 2πc 2 , where c is the lowest possible realization of an individual's voting cost.

Information Aggregation in Polls

“…A similar result has been observed in election settings: Feddersen and Pesendorfer (1997) note in a two-candidate election that the fraction of those voting informatively goes to zero, yet information fully aggregates in the limit for a variety of election rules; see also Curtis R. Taylor and Huseyin Yildirim (2005) and Krishna and Morgan (2008) for an analogous result when voting is costly.…”