neighborhood information exchange and voter participation an experimental study we study the effect of social embeddedness on voter turnout by investigating the role of information about other voters decisions we do so in a participation game in which we distinguish between early and late voters each late voter is told about one early voter s turnout decision cases are distinguished where the voters are allies support the same group or adversaries with opposing preferences and where they are uncertain about each other s preferences our experimental results show that the social embeddedness matters this information increases aggregate turnout by approximately 50 the largest effect is observed for allies early voters strategically try to use their first mover position and late voters respond to this

the performance of pivotal voter models in small scale elections evidence from texas liquor referenda abstract this paper explores the ability of pivotal voter models to explain voter behavior in small scale elections using data from texas liquor referenda the findings provide little support for the view that pivotal voter models are a reasonable theory for understanding small scale elections interestingly this is not because they cannot explain the levels of turnout in the data but rather because they cannot explain the size of the winning margins the logic of pivotal voter models implies that elections must be expected to be close even if there is a significant difference between the sizes of the groups or the intensity of their preferences with even a relatively small number of eligible voters elections that are expected to be close ex ante must end up being close ex post however in the data winning margins are often significant

compulsory versus voluntary voting an experimental study abstract we report on an experiment comparing compulsory and voluntary voting institutions in a voting game with common preferences rational choice theory predicts sharp differences in voter behavior between these two institutions if voting is compulsory then voters may find it rational to vote insincerely i e against their private information if voting is voluntary so that abstention is allowed then sincere voting in accordance with a voter s private information is always rational while participation may become strategic we find strong support for these theoretical predictions in our experimental data moreover voters adapt their decisions to the voting institution in place in such a way as to make the group decision accuracy differences between the two voting institutions negligible the latter finding may serve to rationalize the co existence of compulsory and voluntary voting institutions in nature

turnout across democracies world democracies widely differ in legislative executive and legal institutions different institutional environments induce different mappings from electoral outcomes to the distribution of power we explore how these mappings affect voters participation in an election we show that the effect of such institutional differences on turnout depends on the distribution of voters preferences we uncover a novel contest effect given the preferences distribution turnout increases and then decreases when we move from a more proportional to a less proportional power sharing system turnout is maximized for an intermediate degree of power sharing moreover we generalize the competition effect common to models of endogenous turnout given the institutional environment turnout increases in the ex ante preferences evenness and more so when the overall system has lower power sharing these results are robust to a wide range of modeling approaches including ethical voter models voter mobilization models and rational voter models

political scale and electoral turnout evidence from the less industrialized world this article attempts to bring the politics of scale back into the study of comparative politics explicitly focusing on the question of electoral turnout in the less industrialized world it explo

information aggregation and turnout in proportional representation a laboratory experiment abstract this paper documents a laboratory experiment that analyzes voter participation in common interest proportional representation pr elections comparing this with majority rule consistent with theoretical predictions poorly informed voters in either system abstain from voting thereby shifting weight to those who are better informed a dilution problem makes mistakes especially costly under pr so abstention is higher in pr in contrast with private interest environments and welfare is lower deviations from nash equilibrium predictions can be accommodated by a logit version of quantal response equilibrium qre which allows for voter mistakes

a natural experiment in proposal power and electoral success does lawmaker behavior influence electoral outcomes observational studies cannot elucidate the effect of legislative proposals on electoral outcomes since effects are confounded by unobserved differences in legislative and political skill we take advantage of a unique natural experiment in the canadian house of commons that allows us to estimate how proposing legislation affects election outcomes the right of noncabinet members to propose legislation is assigned by lottery comparing outcomes between those who were granted the right to propose and those who were not we show that incumbents of the governing party enjoy a 2 7 percentage point bonus in vote total in the election following their winning the right to introduce a single piece of legislation which translates to a 7 increase in the probability of winning the causal effect results from higher likeability among constituents these results demonstrate experimentally that what politicians do as lawmakers has a causal effect on electoral outcomes

the paradox of voter participation a laboratory study it is widely believed that rational choice theory is grossly inconsistent with empirical observations about voter turnout we report the results of an experiment designed to test the voter turnout predictions of the rational choice palfrey rosenthal model of participation with asymmetric information we find that the three main comparative statics predictions are observed in the data the size effect whereby turnout goes down in larger electorates the competition effect whereby turnout is higher in elections that are expected to be close and the underdog effect whereby voters supporting the less popular alternative have higher turnout rates we also compare the quantitative magnitudes of turnout to the predictions of nash equilibrium we find that there is undervoting for small electorates and overvoting for large electorates relative to nash equilibrium these deviations from nash equilibrium are consistent with the logit version of quantal response equilibrium which provides a good fit to the data and can also account for significant voter turnout in very large elections

the effects of average revenue regulation on electricity transmission investment and pricing this paper investigates the long run effects of average revenue regulation on an electricity transmission monopolist who applies a two part tariff comprising a variable congestion price and a non negative fixed access fee a binding constraint on the monopolist s expected average revenue lowers the access fee promotes transmission investment and improves consumer surplus in a case of any linear or log linear electricity demand function with a positive probability that no congestion occurs average revenue regulation is allocatively more efficient than a coasian two part tariff if the level of capacity under average revenue regulation is higher than that under a coasian two part tariff

the downsian model of electoral participation formal theory and empirical analysis of the constituency size effect this paper applies a game theoretic model of participation under uncertainty to investigate the negative relationship between constituency size and voter turnout rates theconstituency size effect we find that this theoretical model accounts for almost all of the variation in turnout due to size in cross sectional data from school budget referenda

electoral competition with third party entry in the lab abstract electoral competition between two vote share maximizing candidates in the context of the unidimensional spatial model leads to platform convergence both candidates end up proposing the ideal policy of the median voter downs 1957 palfrey 1984 famously argued that if third candidate entry is expected after the two main candidates choose their platforms the unique equilibrium is such that the two main candidates locate substantially far from each other by conducting a laboratory experiment we put this popular idea to test for the first time we allow entry to take place with four different probabilities and find that indeed the degree of polarization of the two main candidates platforms increases as third candidate entry becomes more likely to occur providing strong evidence in support of palfrey 1984 s formal results and underlying intuition

information aggregation and strategic abstention in large laboratory elections this paper compares strategic abstention in ad hoc committees versus standing committees ad hoc committees meet only once and then dissolve while standing committees the central finding from this study is that most of the predictions of swing voter curse theory hold up in large elections conducted under controlled laboratory conditions there is significant abstention and significant balancing of partisans by uniformed voters and vote balancing increases with the partisan imbalance elections with no partisan imbalance successfully aggregate information and lead to efficient outcomes consistent with swing voter curse theory this efficiency falls off as partisan imbalance increases but to a significantly greater extent than is predicted in equilibrium it is instructive to compare these findings in large elections with results from the elections reported in battaglini et al 2007 all of the qualitative results are the same concerning the comparative statics balancing and abstention one slight difference is that there was less irrational voting for in the small elections than in the large elections except for the 5 9 m 0 treatment where we observed 20 voting for in the small elections compared with 10 voting for in the large elections these differences were reflected in slightly different efficiency results between small and large elections with the comparisons mirroring the differences in voting for more irrational voting results in lower e ciency we conclude that this scaled up study successfully replicates the initial swing voter s curse experiment reported in battaglini et al 2007 obtaining very similar findings in laboratory committees that are three times the size of those in the original study the one caveat is that we found evidence of a slight increase in irrational nonequilibrium behavior voting for in the larger elections whether this trend would continue as election size is further scaled up is an open question a swing voter s curse environment

homo ludens social rationality and political behavior the most straightforward defense of political democracy is grounded in rational choice political democracy gives people power in public life parallel to that afforded by markets in private life the power to turn their preferences into social outcomes however rational choice models of voter behavior dramatically underpredict voter turnout in all but the smallest elections fiorina 1990 has called this the paradox that ate rational choice theory this anomaly is the centerpiece of green and shapiro s 1994 critique of rational choice methodology in political theory this paper proposes a form of social rationality that strengthens the classical rational actor model this concept explains many central statistical regularities concerning voter turnout and the historical regularities concerning collective action

a group rule utilitarian approach to voter turnout theory and evidence this paper explores a group rule utilitarian approach to understanding voter turnout inspired by the theoretical work of john c harsanyi 1980 and timothy j feddersen and alvaro sandroni 2002 it develops a model based on this approach and studies its performance in explaining turnout in texas liquor referenda the results are encouraging the comparative static predictions of the model are broadly consistent with the data and a structurally estimated version of the model yields reasonable coefficient estimates and fits the data well the structurally estimated model also outperforms a simple expressive voting model

public protests and policy making technological advances and the development of social media have made petitions public protests and other form of spontaneous activism increasingly common tools for individuals to influence decision makers to study these phenomena in this article i present a theory of petitions and public protests that explores their limits as mechanisms to aggregate information the key assumption is that valuable information is dispersed among citizens through petitions and protests citizens can signal their private information to the policy maker who can then choose to use it or not i first show that if citizens individual signals are not sufficiently precise information aggregation is impossible no matter how large is the population of informed citizens even if the conflict with the policy maker is small i then characterize the conditions on conflict and the signal structure that guarantee information aggregation when these conditions are satisfied i show that full information aggregation is possible as the population grows to infinity when they are not satisfied i show that information aggregation may still be possible if social media are available

timing of investment under technological and revenue related uncertainties the effects of two forms of uncertainty on the timing of irreversible investment are considered technological uncertainty is modeled as a poisson arrival process that reduces the cost of investment while revenue uncertainty is modeled as a diffusion process technological uncertainty has no effect on the optimal investment policy when revenue uncertainty is absent however when combined with revenue uncertainty increased technological uncertainty makes investment less attractive relative to waiting the paper also makes a more general point in clarifying the difference in how diffusion type of uncertainty and unidirectional stochastic progress affect investment timing

public information and electoral bias abstract we present a theory of voting that predicts that elections are more likely to be close and voter turnout is more likely to be high when citizens possess better public information about the composition of the electorate these findings suggest that providing more information to potential voters about aggregate political preferences e g through pre election polls or expert forecasts may undermine the democratic process our analysis reveals that if the distribution of political preferences is common knowledge then the unique type symmetric equilibrium leads to a stark neutrality result in which each alternative is equally likely to win the election by contrast when citizens are ignorant about the preference distribution the majority is more likely to win the election and expected voter turnout is lower welfare is therefore unambiguously higher when citizens possess less information about the preference distribution

communication and voting in multi party elections an experimental study we investigate communication and costly voting in multi party election experiments turnout is consistently lower across electorate communication as compared with restricted communication within parties voters are more likely to choose the strategic voting option at the outset in restricted communication but more likely to start deliberation by stating their first preference when unrestricted distributions of earnings are more inequitable when communication is restricted and the candidate preferred by the minority of voters is more likely to win we also find that even restricted communication significantly increases participation and strategic voting by swing voters above and beyond induced identity effects

fiscal discipline and flexibility in emu the implementation of the stability and growth pact fiscal discipline to safeguard the credibility of the single monetary authority and fiscal flexibility to respond to country specific shocks are two core principles governing budgetary policy in emu the stability and growth pact aims at ensuring the first objective to comply with the requirements of the pact eu members need to achieve a close to balance or surplus position and change their budgetary behaviour in periods of cyclical upturns by refraining from spending the growth dividend past experience shows that fiscal laxity does not buy more effective stabilization once emu countries have achieved their medium term target their automatic stabilizers will be able to operate fully thus helping in smoothing out cyclical fluctuations the main potential problems in the implementation of the pact may arise in the early years of emu during the transition to a balanced budget in the event of a slow down in economic activity

voter participation and strategic uncertainty the paradox of not voting is examined in a model where voters have uncertainty about the preferences and costs of other voters in game theoretic models of voter participation under complete information equilibrium outcomes can have substantial turnout even when voting costs are relatively high in contrast when uncertainty about preferences and costs is present only voters with negligible or negative net voting costs participate when the electorate is large

option pricing when the variance is changing the monte carlo method is used to solve for the price of a call when the variance is changing stochastically

is mandatory voting better than voluntary voting we investigate the welfare effects of policies that increase voter turnout in costly voting models in a generalized costly voting model we show that if the electorate is sufficiently large then increasing voter turnout is generically efficient increasing turnout in small elections is only inefficient if the electorate is evenly divided or if there is already almost complete voter participation finally we argue that the effects underlying our results are robust in a large class of endogenous participation models

complete information pivotal voter model with asymmetric group size we study the equilibria of the standard pivotal voter participation game between two groups of voters of asymmetric sizes majority and minority as originally proposed by palfrey and rosenthal public choice 41 1 7 53 1983 we find a unique equilibrium wherein the minority votes with certainty and the majority votes with probability in 0 1 we prove that this is the only equilibrium in which voters of only one group play a pure strategy and we provide sufficient conditions for its existence equilibria where voters of both groups vote with probability in 0 1 are analyzed numerically

a unified analysis of rational voting with private values and group specific costs we provide a unified analysis of the canonical rational voting model with privately known political preferences and costs of voting focusing on type symmetric equilibrium we show that for small electorates members of the minority group vote with a strictly higher probability than do those in the majority but the majority is strictly more likely to win the election as the electorate size grows without bound equilibrium outcome is completely determined by the individuals possessing the lowest cost of voting in each political group we relate our equilibrium characterization to myerson s poisson games and examine the potential uniqueness of equilibrium

an explanation of anomalous behavior in models of political participation this paper characterizes behavior with noisy decision making for models of political interaction characterized by simultaneous binary decisions applications include voting participation games candidate entry the volunteer s dilemma and collective action problems with a contribution threshold a simple graphical device is used to derive comparative statics and other theoretical properties of a quantal response equilibrium and the resulting predictions are compared with nash equilibria that arise in the limiting case of no noise many anomalous data patterns in laboratory experiments based on these games can be explained in this manner

advocacy and political convergence under preference uncertainty we study the formation of advocacy groups and how they can impact policy outcomes by revealing information about voters preferences to uninformed political candidates we conduct a laboratory experiment based on a two candidate spatial electoral competition setting where the policy preferences of voters are initially unknown and change over time in the control treatment candidates learn about the preferred policy of the median voter through the voting outcome of elections in the advocacy treatments voters can organize themselves into advocacy groups in order to reveal their policy preferences we find that voters often overcome the collective action problem of forming an advocacy group in fact we observe the formation of both informative advocacy groups which convey new information and uninformative advocacy groups which do not overall advocacy groups significantly speed up the convergence to the preferred policy of the median voter however advocacy does not lead to higher earnings as the gains from faster convergence are offset by the costs of group formation

get out the costly vote institutional design for greater participation institutions designed to increase turnout appeal to democratic sentiments but are highly debated as they entail two potentially countervailing eects while generating more pieces of information they may decrease the average voter s information quality we examine two commonly discussed institutions inducing participation abstention penalties used in 32 countries around the world and lotteries providing a prize to one randomly chosen participant as proposed on the 2006 arizona ballot we analyze a benchmark rational choice model in which voters vary in their information quality and participation is costly we illustrate that both institutions can improve collective outcomes though lotteries are a more eective instrument asymptotically in an array of lab experiments we empirically assess institutional performance we nd strong evidence for selective participation lab voters participate more when better informed or when institutionally induced however because subjects vote more often than the equilibrium predictions these institutions entail less welfare benets than theory prescribes lotteries do fare better than nes suggesting that they may be a useful alternative to commonly used compulsory

optimal timing of transmission line investments in the face of uncertain demand an option valuation approach abstract grid based electrification programmes involve irreversible transmission line investments that can be delayed by temporarily resorting to decentralized powet supply technologies in this context decision makers face the difficulty that the future evolution of demand and thus the returns from postponing the transmission line investment are uncertain this imposes an opportunity cost resembling the value of a financial call option therefore standard option valuation techniques can be applied to solve the problem of timing transmission line investments in the presence of stochastic demand it is shown analytically and in terms of numerical examples that demand uncertainty may provide a strong incentive to defer the extension of the grid beyond the date that would be optimal under deterministic conditions

decision analysis of merchant transmission investment by perpetual options theory this paper introduces the concept of perpetual options theory to analyze merchant transmission investment through an approved rate since the electric usages and the associated revenue is stochastic in nature applying the perpetual options theory allows an investor to determine the most opportunistic time to start a transmission project and obtain the maximum revenue returns or let the option expire when the economic incentive is not sufficient in today s environment this decision approach is more appropriate since it provides transmission investors a better projection of its return on investment and an exit strategy for an investment decision

altruism and voting a large turnout result that does not rely on civic duty or cooperative behavior abstract i propose a game theoretic model of costly voting that predicts significant turnout rates even when the electorate is arbitrarily large the model has two key features that jointly drive the result i some agents are altruistic or ethical ii among the agents who prefer any given candidate the fraction of altruistic agents is uncertain when deciding whether to vote or not an altruistic agent compares her private voting cost with the expected contribution of her vote to the welfare of the society under suitable homogeneity assumptions the asymptotic predictions of my model coincide with those of feddersen and sandroni 12 up to potential differences between the respective parameters that measure the importance of the election i demonstrate with an example that these homogeneity assumptions are not necessary for qualitative predictions of my model i also show that when the fractions of altruistic agents are known turnout rates will typically be close to zero in a large election despite the presence of altruism

evaluating interconnector investments in the north european electricity system considering fluctuating wind power penetration with increasing amounts of power generation from intermittent sources like wind transmission planning has not only to account for the expected load curve but also for the stochasticity of volatile power infeeds moreover investments in power generation are no longer centrally planned in deregulated power markets but rather decided on competitive grounds by individual power companies this poses particular challenges when it comes to evaluating the benefits of increased interconnection capacities in large scale systems like the european transmission system within this article an approach is presented which allows assessing the benefits of interconnector investments in the presence of stochastic power infeed and endogenous power plant investments this model uses typical days and hours as well as recombining trees to represent both load and infeed fluctuations an application is presented covering 30 european countries and simultaneously optimizing generation investments and dispatch as well as utilization of transmission lines the model is used to evaluate the benefits of further line extensions between the european mainland and northern european countries we compute welfare gains and the distribution of these gains within a business as usual scenario up to 2030