What Makes Voters Turn Out: The Effects of Polls and Beliefs

Agranov, Marina; Goeree, Jacob K.; Romero, Julián; Yariv, Leeat

doi:10.1093/jeea/jvx023

Cited by 61 publications

(63 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…Third, our results speak to models where voters see being a "winner" as having value in itself (Callander 2007, Callander and Wilson 2008, and Agranov, Goeree, Romero, and Yariv 2018 to the (previously discussed) evidence that rank-based decision-making affects political outcomes.…”

Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 61%

Rank Effects in Bargaining: Evidence from Government Formation

Fujiwara

Sanz

2019

The Review of Economic Studies

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Theories of multilateral bargaining and coalition formation applied to legislatures predict that parties’ seat shares determine their bargaining power. We present findings that are difficult to reconcile with this prediction, but consistent with a norm prescribing that “the most voted party should form the government”. We first present case studies from several countries and regression discontinuity design-based evidence from twenty-eight national European parliaments. We then focus on 2,898 Spanish municipal elections in which two parties tie in the number of seats. We find that the party with slightly more general election votes is substantially more likely to appoint the mayor. Since tied parties should (on average) have equal bargaining power, this identifies the effect of being labeled the most voted. This effect is comparable to that of obtaining an additional seat, and is also present when a right-wing party is the most voted and the second and third most voted parties are allied left-wing parties who can form a combined majority. A model where elections both aggregate information and discipline incumbents can rationalize our results and yields additional predictions we take to the data, such as voters punishing second most voted parties that appoint mayors.

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Section: Introductionsupporting

confidence: 61%

Rank Effects in Bargaining: Evidence from Government Formation

Fujiwara

Sanz

2019

The Review of Economic Studies

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“…Following Morton and Ou (2015), we have called this phenomenon bandwagon effect. As they point out, several experimental studies find that participants are more likely to vote if they believe that their candidate is likely to win (Duffy and Tavits, 2008;Grosser and Schram, 2010;Kartal, 2014;Agranov, Goeree, Romero, and Yariv, 2012). Morton and Ou (2015, p. 229) suggest two mechanisms that can be at work, either simultaneously or in isolation: "a voter gains some utility by voting for the winner" and "a voter loses some utility by voting for the loser".…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Following Morton and Ou (2015), we refer to this as bandwagon effect. 7 As noted by Morton and Ou, this is a common finding in laboratory experiments on voting behavior (Duffy and Tavits, 2008;Grosser and Schram, 2010;Kartal, 2014;Agranov, Goeree, Romero, and Yariv, 2012). 5 A potential disadvantage of using a real effort task is the lack of control over the cost function.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Costly voting: a large-scale real effort experiment

2019

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We test the turnout predictions of the standard two-party, private value, costly voting model through a large-scale, real effort experiment. We do this by recruiting 1,200 participants through Amazon's Mechanical Turk and employing a 2 x 2 between subjects design encompassing small (N = 30) and large (N = 300) elections, as well as close and one-sided elections. We find partial evidence of selfish instrumental voting. Participants with a higher opportunity cost are less likely to vote (cost effect); turnout rate decreases as the electorate size increases (size effect) in one-sided elections and increases the closer the election is (competition effect) in large elections. Contrary to the theoretical predictions, in large one-sided elections the majority turns out to vote at a higher rate than the minority. We propose an alternative theory assuming that voters obtain a small non-monetary utility if they vote and their party wins.

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“…(2) there is a non-empty set of income levels   such that -donors are uncapped and -donors are capped:        =  (3) there is a (possibly empty) set of income levels   such that both  and -donors are capped,    =    =  Parts (1) and (2) imply that  ( ) must be strictly less than 0   The fact that proportionately more -donors than -donors are capped when    0 implies that their joint contribution capacity is reduced more than 's. This amounts to letting   drop because of a reduction in top  incomes.…”

Section: Proof Of Propositionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus far, the focus has been on large donors with a policy in ‡uence motive for contributing. 4 For small donors, a consumption motive is put forward almost 1 http://www.fec.gov/disclosurep/pnational.do;jsessionid=5E34A548A5EEB1D08BBECEA07049DF53.worker1 and http://www.fec.gov/disclosurep/pnational.do 2 http://search.electoralcommission.org.uk/Api/Accounts/Documents/17488 3 Most of the rest being public funding, while medium and large contributions represented about 9% of the total. 4 The leading theoretical model is that of Helpman (1994, 1996), although the empirical literature …nds mixed support for an in ‡uence motive (Stratmann, 1992 1 by default.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Theory of Small Campaign Contributions

Bouton¹,

Castanheira²,

Drazen³

2018

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We propose a theory of small campaign contributions driven by an electoral motive, i.e., the desire to influence election outcomes. Though small donors take as given the actions of others, strategic interactions induce patterns consistent with empirical findings, e.g., election closeness and underdog effects. We also study different forms of campaign finance laws, and show why caps should be combined with a progressive tax on contributions. Next, we introduce large donors and show that several conclusions in the literature may be significantly modified by the interaction with small donors. Throughout, we discuss the empirical implications of our findings.

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What Makes Voters Turn Out: The Effects of Polls and Beliefs

Cited by 61 publications

References 44 publications

Rank Effects in Bargaining: Evidence from Government Formation

Rank Effects in Bargaining: Evidence from Government Formation

Costly voting: a large-scale real effort experiment

A Theory of Small Campaign Contributions

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