The Perverse Politics of Polarization

Ali, S. Nageeb; Mihm, Maximilian; Siga, Lucas

doi:10.2139/ssrn.2907489

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…This establishes claim (2). (29) also decreases in K (and therefore in p) for all , implying that the solution 1 to (31) strictly decreases in K (and therefore in p), as claimed in (3).…”

Section: Online Appendixsupporting

confidence: 64%

“…That the left-hand side is strictly decreasing when positive implies that (36) has a unique solution 1 for any K 0, which is hence decreasing in K and therefore in p. Moreover, for p = 0 = K it satis…es 0 < 1 < < 1. This establishes claims (1) through (3). Claim (4) follows just as in the case of pure marginal voting: the right-hand side of (35) increases with , and an increase in F raises the left-hand side, thereby increasing the solution 1 .…”

Section: Online Appendixsupporting

confidence: 57%

“…2 This is useful for explaining why voters often deliberately abstain, even in settings where voting is costless, for example by casting incomplete ballots, and has been corroborated by extensive evidence that voters become more likely to vote when their information improves. 3 Since voters are only willing to rely on others'expertise when they share a common objective, that paper has also led to a resurgence of the classic common interest paradigm of Condorcet (1785), where elections serve to pool information rather than resolve con ‡icts of interest. 4 However, if voting also exerts a marginal impact on policy outcomes, as in Figure 1, then voters should take this into account, meaning that the standard pivotal voting calculus is wrong-or at least incomplete.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This paper proposes the …rst common interest model of voter turnout that takes both the pivotal and the marginal impact of a vote into account. 5 We include pivotal 3 For reviews of this empirical literature, see Triossi (2013) and McMurray (2015). In particular, turnout and roll-o¤ are both correlated with political knowledge and with other variables associated with information, such as education and age.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Marginal Voter’s Curse*

Herrera

Llorente-Saguer

McMurray

2019

The Economic Journal

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The swing voter's curse is useful for explaining patterns of voter participation, but arises because voters restrict attention to the rare event of a pivotal vote. Recent empirical evidence suggests that electoral margins in ‡uence policy outcomes, even away from the 50% threshold. If so, voters should also pay attention to the marginal impact of a vote. Adopting this assumption, we …nd that a marginal voter's curse gives voters a new reason to abstain, to avoid diluting the pool of information. The two curses have similar origins and exhibit similar patterns, but the marginal voter's curse is both stronger and more robust. In fact, the swing voter's curse turns out to be knife-edge: in large elections, a model with both pivotal and marginal considerations and a model with marginal considerations alone generate identical equilibrium behavior.JEL classi…cation: C72, D70 for helpful comments and suggestions. We would also like to thank Bruno Nogueira Lanzer for excellent assistance.

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“…This establishes claim (2). (29) also decreases in K (and therefore in p) for all , implying that the solution 1 to (31) strictly decreases in K (and therefore in p), as claimed in (3).…”

Section: Online Appendixsupporting

confidence: 64%

Section: Online Appendixsupporting

confidence: 57%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

The Marginal Voter’s Curse*

Herrera

Llorente-Saguer

McMurray

2019

The Economic Journal

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“…There, the main question is of full information equivalence: is the majority's decision the same with perfect and imperfect information? Due to the conflict of interest between voters, information equivalence is not guaranteed, especially when voters' evaluation of a policy is different conditional on receiving the same information (Bhattacharya, 2013a,b;Ali et al, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Wisdom of the Crowd? Information Aggregation and Electoral Incentives

Prato

Wolton

2017

SSRN Journal

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Elections have long been understood as a mean to encourage candidates to act in voters' interest as well as a way to aggregate dispersed information. This paper juxtaposes these two key features within a unified framework. As in models of electoral control, candidates compete for office by strategically proposing policy platforms. As in models of information aggregation, agents are not always informed about the policy which maximizes the electorate welfare. Candidates face a trade-off between acting in the electorate's best interest and maximizing their chance of being elected. We provide conditions under which electoral institutions encourage candidates' conformism-thereby stifling proper competition among ideas-and render information aggregation unfeasible in equilibrium. In extensions, we highlight that the new political failure we uncover cannot be fully resolved by liberalizing access to candidacy or reducing voter information. * We thank

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Polarization and inefficient information aggregation under strategic voting

Tajika

2020

Soc Choice Welf

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The Perverse Politics of Polarization

Cited by 8 publications

References 41 publications

The Marginal Voter’s Curse*

The Marginal Voter’s Curse*

Wisdom of the Crowd? Information Aggregation and Electoral Incentives

Polarization and inefficient information aggregation under strategic voting

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