Voting as communicating: Mandates, multiple candidates, and the signaling voter's curse

McMurray, Joseph

doi:10.1016/j.geb.2016.12.005

Cited by 18 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 39 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…They find that in large societies, relatively uninformed voters abstain, and information is aggregated efficiently. Finally, McMurray (2017) and Prato and Wolton (2017) show that voting might be less efficient in aggregating information, when the policy alternatives are proposed by self-interested candidates.…”

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Information Aggregation with Delegation of Votes

Dhillon¹,

Kotsialou²,

Xefteris³

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent developments in blockchain technology have made possible greater progress on secure electronic voting, opening the way to better ways of democratic decision making. In this paper we formalise the features of ``liquid democracy'' which allows voters to delegate their votes to other voters, and we explore whether it improves information aggregation as compared to direct voting. We consider a two-alternative setup with truth-seeking voters (informed and uninformed) and partisan ones (leftists and rightists), and we show that delegation improves information aggregation in finite elections. We also propose a mechanism that further improves the information aggregation properties of delegation in private information settings, by guaranteeing that all vote transfers are from uninformed to informed truth-seeking voters. Delegation offers effective ways for truth-seeking uninformed voters to boost the vote-share of the alternative that matches the state of the world in all considered setups and hence deserves policy makers' attention.

show abstract

Section: Related Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Information Aggregation with Delegation of Votes

Dhillon¹,

Kotsialou²,

Xefteris³

2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For instance, in close elections where the result is uncertain, it may be optimal to support an underdog in the hope that if the underdog wins, the voter experiences a large utility gain, whereas the underdog losing does not hurt as much, because underdog status implies that the candidate was more likely to lose anyway. Another argument along the same lines could be that voters vote strategically and cast their ballots to send signals to politicians (Razin 2003;Castanheira 2003;McMurray 2017), and it is therefore optimal for them to vote for an underdog owing to certain utility considerations, such as preventing an undesirable outcome when the preferred choice is unlikely to win. That is somewhat like choosing a "lesser evil" or ensuring that the most disliked candidate does not end up winning, as is fairly relevant in multi-party democracies like India.…”

Section: Motivations For Underdog Votingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Voting for the underdog or jumping on the bandwagon? Evidence from India’s exit poll ban

Chatterjee

2020

Public Choice

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Exit poll surveys during elections are conducted to predict the outcome of actual elections. However, such polls historically have been controversial, particularly for multi-phase elections, because they can influence the behavior of voters in the later rounds of voting. If subsequent voters are more likely to vote for the predicted frontrunner, the effect is known as the bandwagon voting phenomenon, whereas if they vote for the predicted trailing candidate, the phenomenon is known as underdog voting. To avoid such issues, in 2009 the election administration in the world's largest democracy (India) introduced a blanket ban on publishing exit polls in the media until all rounds of an election are completed. Exploiting the potentially exogenous timing of this reform, and using administrative data to compare states that went to elections before and after the ban, we find that in response to the policy, vote shares increased for the frontrunner and declined for others. The result implies that in the counterfactual, without the ban, fewer people would have voted for the frontrunner. The evidence is suggestive of underdog voting.

show abstract

“…First, strategic voters care about the outcome of the pending election when making their decisions. In contrast, protest voters, at the time of their decision making, seek to achieve some long-term goal beyond the current election (McMurray, 2017; Meirowitz and Shotts, 2009; Meirowitz and Tucker, 2007; Myatt, 2017). Second, and even more important, the underlying motives to vote insincerely differ between the two types: whereas strategic voters are motivated by wanting to influence an election outcome, protest voters are motivated by wanting to signal discontent stemming from perceived failures of their most preferred party.…”

Section: Defining a Protest Votementioning

confidence: 99%

Anticipated Election Result and Protest Voting: Why and When Canadian Voters Signal Discontent

Schimpf

2019

Can J Pol Sci

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article investigates how Canadian voters react to a perceived lack of quality provided by their most preferred parties and how the anticipated election outcome conditions the reactions. The central argument is that a lack of quality motivates voters to signal their discontent by voting insincerely—that is, they cast a protest vote. The effect is expected to be moderated by the anticipated constituency result. The arguments are tested with two-wave panel survey data from the 2015 Canadian federal election, collected by the Making Electoral Democracy Work (MEDW) project. The results support the central argument but remain inconclusive about the expected moderating effects.

show abstract

Voting as communicating: Mandates, multiple candidates, and the signaling voter's curse

Cited by 18 publications

References 39 publications

Information Aggregation with Delegation of Votes

Information Aggregation with Delegation of Votes

Voting for the underdog or jumping on the bandwagon? Evidence from India’s exit poll ban

Anticipated Election Result and Protest Voting: Why and When Canadian Voters Signal Discontent

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About