voter turnout in the industrial democracies during the 1980s there are two contending accounts of cross national variation in voter turnout rates one emphasizes the role of institutions and electoral attributes whereas the other stresses cultural and historical factors the authors evaluate the merits of these two arguments they first apply the model developed by r w jackman to turnout rates during the 1980s expanding the sample of industrial states to include three newer democracies with recent authoritarian histories greece portugal and spain they then examine the potential impact of cultural variables on voter turnout rates the authors conclude that the institutional argument outperforms the cultural account of conventional political participation

low intensity democracy revisited the effects of economic liberalization on political activity in latin america existing literature emphasizes the disorganizing or weakening effects of economic liberalization on civil society whereby free market policies are said to demobilize and depoliticize collective actors the article evaluates the effects of economic liberalization on large scale societal mobilizations across seventeen latin american countries for the period 1970 2000 the article further tests the effects of economic liberalization on individual political participation across sixteen latin american countries for the period 1980 2000 in contrast to the atomization literature this article provides strong evidence that economic liberalization leads to greater levels of societal mobilization in the context of free market democratization the article also demonstrates that economic liberalization does not induce a decline in political participation collectively these results cast doubt on the theoretical underpinnings and empirical findings presented in kurtz 2004

inserting gm products into the food chain the market and welfare effects of different labeling and regulatory regimes the purpose of this article is to examine the system wide effects of the introduction of genetically modified gm products with and without labeling and to compare these two regimes to a third regime where gm products are not present either because they have not yet been developed or because they have been banned for each regime the decisions and welfare of consumers producers and life science companies are examined the article explicitly incorporates the consumer response to the introduction of gm technology and considers different market structures of the life science sector

redistribution income and voting a model that reconciles the positive association between income and voting found in cross sectional studies with the negative correlation between income and turnout over time is developed voting is modeled as a group rational activity voter turnout rates in the united states for the 1948 1960 1968 and 1980 elections are used to test the model voter turnout is found first to fall and then to rise as families move up the income distribution voter turnout also rises as real wages fall as educational attainment increases as elections become closer and as poll taxes and literacy tests are removed

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

legislator turnout and the calculus of voting the determinants of abstention in the u s congress the belief that turnout and abstention depend on theinteraction of the benefits and costs of voting is oneof the longest held in public choice the interplaybetween benefits and costs has typically been studiedwithin the context of voter turnout in elections butthese results are confounded by the fact thatparticipation in such elections is a low cost low benefit activity analysis of voting in legislatures where the potential returns and costs to participantsare greater is more promising

proportionality and turnout evidence from french municipalities many studies find that voter turnout is higher in proportional representation pr elections than in plurality elections but because the two systems differ in multiple ways and are used in differe

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

the effects of prior beliefs and learning on consumers acceptance of genetically modified foods abstract new food products using genetically modified crops appeared in u s supermarkets starting in 1996 and consumers perceived some risks this paper examines the role of consumers prior beliefs about genetic modification and of diverse new information on their willingness to pay for foods that might be genetically modified we use data from economics experiments and show that participants who had informed prior beliefs discounted gm labeled food products more highly than those who had uninformed prior beliefs uninformed participants were especially susceptible to information from interested and third parties in contrast informed participants were generally not affected significantly by new information

expressive voting and electoral equilibrium there are two rival accounts of rational voting in the public choice tradition the mainstream instrumental account that sees the vote as a revelation of preference over possible electoral outcomes essentially analogous to a market choice and the expressive account that sees the vote as expressing support for one or other electoral options rather like cheering at a football match this paper attempts to lay out some of the implications of the expressive account of voting for the issue of who votes as well as for the nature of political equilibrium and to compare these implications with those derived from the instrumental account we also identify and discuss the alternative views of the domain of electoral politics associated with the instrumental and expressive accounts of voting and sketch a route towards the integration of expressive and instrumental ideas in the analysis of rational electoral politics

a new solution to the collective action problem the paradox of voter turnout macy s work offers a potential solution to the paradox of voter turnout the stochastic learning theory of voter turnout kanazawa 1998 posits that citizens perceive a correlation between their behavior voting versus abstention and the outcome of collective action win versus loss for their candidate and that they interpret the outcome as a reinforcer or a punisher the theory can solve the paradox of voter turnout because now p the probability that one s vote is or appears decisive equals approximately 500 in the calculus of voting model instead of p 0 i use general social survey data to test the theory the empirical results indicate that citizens make their turnout decisions according to the win stay lose shift pattern predicted by the stochastic learning theory especially if there are no strong third party candidates

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 theory of participation in elections we analyze a model of participation in elections in which voting is costly and no vote is pivotal ethical agents are motivated to participate when they determine that agents of their type are obligated to do so unlike previous duty based models of participation in our model an ethical agent s obligation to vote is determined endogenously as a function of the behavior of other agents our model predicts high turnout and comparative statics that are consistent with strategic behavior jel d72

the influence of the number of statewide legislative referendums on voter participation in the us this empirical study seeks to broaden the interpretation of the rational voter model so as to include the potential effects of the number of statewide legislative referendums this study tests the hypothesis that greater numbers of such referendums increase voter turnout because they elevate the expected gross benefits egb of voting by empowering voters while not significantly increasing the expected gross costs egc of voting using state level data for the 2006 general election in the us as well as the 2004 us presidential election and after allowing for a variety of economic and demographic factors this study finds compelling evidence that the number of statewide legislative referendums does significantly increase voter turnout

counting the number of parties an alternative index i propose an alternative index to operationalize the variable number and size of parties in a party system to support it i present a critical overview of the two most common indices laakso and taagepera s effective number of parties and kesselman and wildgen s hyperfractionalization showing the causes of their weakness then i explain the computational logic of my alternative number of parties and compare it with the other two using hypothetical cases after that i contrast the laakso taagepera index with mine using data from actual elections between 1945 and 1981 i conclude that my index outperforms the other two as an operationalization of the variable number and size of parties

demand for beef from cattle administered growth hormones or fed genetically modified corn a comparison of consumers in france germany the united kingdom and the united states we compare consumer valuations of beef ribeye steaks from cattle produced without growth hormones or genetically modified corn in france germany the united kingdom and the united states results suggest that french consumers place a higher value on beef from cattle that have not been administered added growth hormones than u s consumers however valuations of non hormone treated beef are statistically indistinguishable across germany the united kingdom and the united states results also suggest that european consumers place a much higher value on beef from cattle that have not been fed genetically modified corn than u s consumers copyright 2003 oxford university press

effects and value of verifiable information in a controversial market evidence from lab auctions of genetically modified food food products containing genetically modified gm ingredients have entered the market over the past decade the biotech industry and environmental groups have disseminated conflicting private information about gm foods this paper develops a unique methodology for valuing independent third party information in such a setting and applies this method to consumers willingness to pay for food products that might be gm data are collected from real consumers in an auction market setting with randomized information and labeling treatments the average value of third party information per lab participant is small but the public good value across u s consumers is shown to be quite large jel c91 d12 d82

rational choice and turnout turning out to vote is the most common and important act of political participation in any democracy voting is also less well understood and explained empirically than other political acts engaged in regularly by citizens turnout however presents a special problem for rational choice theories of politics for it is taken to be the paradigmatic example of the problem of collective action in which although all may benefit from voting it is rarely in the individual s self interest to vote this paper begins by examining the problem of explaining turnout a basic form of rational choice models of turnout is developed basic in the sense that it is common to all such models this basic model is shown to be incomplete and the two most important models the calculus of voting and the minimax regret model are illustrated as alternative ways to complete this basic model along with mention of game theoretic models their strengths and weaknesses are then assessed the remainder of the paper argues that rational choice accounts of turnout are possible the first step is to argue that turnout is not an especially problematic version of the collective action problem because it is for many a low cost low expected benefit decision a strategic politicians account of turnout and campaigns is examined next a reinterpretation of the intrinsic benefits of voting is then considered and is used to examine the most important substantive problem in the turnout literature its decline these steps i argue make theories of ordinary political decisions at once both more political and more integrated into the politics of the larger system

closeness expenditures and turnout in the 1982 u s house elections students of elections have repeatedly found that the closeness of an election is modestly correlated with turnout this may be due to a direct response of instrumentally motivated voters but recent theoretical work casts doubt on the adequacy of this explanation another possibility is that elite actors respond to closeness with greater effort at mobilization we explore the latter possibility by using fec and state data on campaign expenditures in house senate and gubernatorial races our results indicate that closeness has an effect at both the mass and elite levels we also provide quantitative estimates of the effect of senate and gubernatorial expenditure on house turnout

getting out the vote participation in gubernatorial elections scholarship on electoral turnout has long emphasized two main themes explanations of nonvoting in terms of individual characteristics and in terms of contextual variables these investigations have deeply enriched our understanding of electoral participation but their limitations have also sensitized us to the remaining problems of explanation perusal of the work on american politics exposes a rather striking tendency in studies of participation to ignore or soft pedal the effects of active political mobilization in this article we formulate two models of electoral turnout socioeconomic and political mobilization and apply them to aggregate data on voting in gubernatorial elections of 1978 and 1980 the socioeconomic model of turnout includes such influences as income age and educational attainment to assess the effects of political mobilization we have considered campaign spending partisan competition electoral margin and the presence or absence of a simultaneous race for the united states senate both of the models perform quite well individually producing significant and meaningful coefficients and adequate fits yet in the final analysis we demonstrate that quite apart from major sources of variation in gubernatorial turnout such as region and presidential versus nonpresidential years the mobilizing influences of campaign activism and competitiveness have a strong impact on electoral participation electoral law i e closing date of registration retains a small but significant effect on voting for governor and socioeconomic characteristics included in a fully specified model have little to contribute independently to an explanation of electoral turnout these findings are very much in the same vein as related cross national investigations which emphasize the crucial role of electoral law and political parties and downplay individual characteristics as determinants of electoral participation on the basis of the research reported here we argue that scholars need to pay more attention to political mobilization as an explanation of electoral turnout in the presidential election between cox and harding in 1920 only half of the eligible voters participated this relatively low turnout together with the historically minimal rates of participation in state and local elections created deep concern among those who believed that reasonably high levels of political involvement are crucial in maintaining a healthy democratic politics it was in this atmosphere of worry about low electoral turnout that charles e merriam and harold f gosnell 1924 conducted in the city of chicago the first systematic study of nonvoting subsequently gosnell 1927 went even further and executed the first experimental study in modern political science demonstrating conditions that could stimulate electoral turnout we too worry about low participation in elections today at every level of government and we believe these classic studies

redistribution in a model of voting and campaign contributions abstract i propose a framework in which individual political participation can take two distinct forms voting and contributing resources to campaigns in a context in which the negligible impact of any individual s actions on aggregate outcomes is fully recognized by all agents i then use the framework to reassess the relationship between inequality and redistribution the model shows that even though each contribution has a negligible impact the interaction between contributions and voting leads to an endogenous wealth bias in the political process as the advantage of wealthier individuals in providing contributions encourages parties to move their platforms closer to those individuals preferred positions this mechanism can in turn explain why the standard median voter based prediction that more inequality produces more redistribution has received little empirical support higher inequality endogenously shifts the political system further in favor of the rich in equilibrium there is a non monotonic relationship in which redistribution is initially increasing but eventually decreasing in inequality i present some empirical evidence supporting the framework using data on campaign contributions from us presidential elections in particular inequality increases contributions to republicans but not to democrats as predicted by the model

concurrent elections and turnout causal estimates from a german quasi experiment conventional wisdom suggests that scheduling elections concurrently with other contests increases turnout however causal empirical evidence in favor of this claim is scarce at best moreover it is a priori unclear whether theory would predict a higher turnout if two low office elections are combined instead of a combination of a low office election and a major electoral race using a quasi experiment and a difference in differences estimation approach at the german municipality level i provide evidence that combining two low office elections significantly increases turnout

proportional representation with citizen candidates we construct a simple model incorporating bothcitizen candidates and proportional representation andinvestigate its properties in a basic case with auniform distribution of citizen ideal points and purepolicy motivations and in further cases which allowof office rents and other distributions ofpreferences the idea of citizen candidates developedby osborne and slivinski 1996 besley and coate 1997 endogenises the decision to stand as acandidate and allows explicit study of the number andtype of candidates as an equilibrium phenomenon theidea of proportional representation allows a moreflexible relationship between the pattern of votescast and the final policy outcome and also providesa richer model of political representation ourdiscussion points to the widespread possibility ofequilibria involving non median policy outcomes provides insights into the relationship betweenproportional representation and the equilibrium numberof candidates and also provides an explicit accountof the trade off between candidate benefitsdistributed on a winner take all basis and those thatare mediated through proportional representation

dynamic parties and social turnout an agent based model1 the authors develop an agent based model of dynamic parties with social turnout built upon developments in different fields within social science this model yields significant turnout divergent platforms and numerous results consistent with the rational calculus of voting model and the empirical literature on social turnout in a simplified version of the model the authors show how a local imitation structure inherently yields dynamics that encourage positive turnout the model also generates new hypotheses about the importance of social networks and citizen party interactions

the rise of the modern welfare state ideology institutions and income security analysis and evidence in the 25 year period between 1960 and 1985 there was a great expansion of welfare state programs throughout the west the fraction of gdp accounted for by social expenditures doubled in much of europe and grew by 40 50 in many other oecd nations after 1985 growth in social insurance programs slowed relative to other parts of the economy this paper explores the extent to which institutions and ideological shifts may have accounted for the period of rapid growth for differences in the extent of that growth and for the subsequent reduction in the growth rates of social insurance programs

referendum design quorum rules and turnout in this article we focus on the consequences of quorum requirements for turnout in referendums we use a rational choice decision theoretic voting model to demonstrate that participation quorums change the incentives some electors face inducing those who oppose changes in the status quo and expect to be in the minority to abstain as a result paradoxically participation quorums decrease electoral participation we test our model s predictions using data for all referendums held in current european union countries from 1970 until 2007 and show that the existence of a participation quorums increases abstention by more than ten percentage points

adding asymmetrically dominated alternatives violations of regularity and the similarity hypothesis an asymmetrically dominated alternative is dominated by one item in the set but not by another adding such an alternative to a choice set can increase the probability of choosing the item that dominates it this result points to the inadequacy of many current choice models and suggests product line strategies that might not otherwise be intuitively plausible

media and polarization this paper provides an economic framework to explain the impact of the media on political polarization we start from a context where media environments characterized by their levels of accessibility and ideological content variety aect citizens ideological views and political motivation from this we derive comparative statics in a model of electoral competition with endogenous turnout in which politicians react to those media inuenced attitudes we identify two channels the ideology eect whereby a decrease in media ideological variety leads to convergence in citizens views and hence to lower polarization and the composition eect whereby a lowering of barriers to media accessibility increases turnout and hence aects the composition of the electorate as the inow of new citizens who turn out are relatively more moderate we show that the composition eect aects the extensive and intensive margins for political parties chasing voters so that its ultimate direction depends on the political system lower polarization in majoritarian systems but higher polarization under proportional representation we test the model s predictions in the us context of the introduction of broadcast tv in the 1940s and 1950s and radio in the 1920s and 1930s consistent with our model the evidence shows that tv decreased polarization and exposure to radio was associated with lower polarization the evidence suggests that the composition eect predominated in the case of radio while the ideology eect was more important in the case of tv

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

cores and competitive equilibria with indivisibilities and lotteries abstract lotteries are introduced in the exchange model of shapley and scarf j math econ 1 1974 23 37 in competition traders buy and sell probabilities on houses when considering the core feasible allocations of the economy and blocking allocations of coalitions may involve lotteries among other results we show that the set of lottery equilibrium allocations is non empty and does not contain all competitive equilibrium allocations the core of the shapley scarf model is a strict subset of the lottery core and lottery equilibrium allocations are contained in the lottery core journal of economic literature classification numbers c62 c71

decomposing political advertising effects on vote choices this paper studies the channels through which political television advertising influences individuals voting decisions scholars are interested to learn whether advertising primarily persuades people to change their choices of candidates or mobilizes people to vote i find that advertising does both about 60 to 70 of advertising s effect is persuasion and 30 to 40 of it is mobilization advertising s effects are stronger on those who did not plan to vote for a major party candidate to decompose the impact into its components the present paper estimates a multinomial probit model that permits analysis of decisions of turnout and candidate choice jointly in a markov chain framework in contrast to most studies that estimate the effects of aggregated exposure to advertising on voters choices on election day i study how advertising influences peoples monthly voting intentions leading up to election day in the context of the 2008 presidential election the magnitude of the advertising effect is not large enough to overcome john mccain s significant deficit but it potentially could have changed the outcomes of other close elections such as those in 2000 and 2016

differentiating the consumer benefits from labeling of gm food products although recurrent evidence is found that consumers have different willingness to pay for gm and non gm products there is disagreement in the scientific community about the size of consumer benefits from gm labeling in this article we use a theoretical model based on a standard constant elasticity of substitution ces to explain the importance of the quality effect it is shown that failing to consider the quality effect may yield an overestimation of benefits from gm labeling voluntary or mandatory

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

rational turnout the neglected role of groups rational choice theories have difficulty accounting for individual participation in collective action voting is among the acts hardest to explain consumption benefits have been proposed to account for nonzero turnout the model presented here establishes a political investment basis for these benefits i argue that voters often act not in isolation but as part of groups with shared interests while individuals still vote because of consumption benefits arising from the act of voting some of these consumption benefits are provided by group leaders out of collective benefits received by the group in return for its votes the collective benefit comes from a candidate adopting policy positions closer to those of the group in passing i show that the widespread availability of public opinion polling increases the candidate s incentive to shift position finally some data from recent off year elections are shown to be consistent with the model

a passion for voting we model expressive voting as a dynamic game with informed and ignorant voters a voter has selective memory for actions and he is aware of it we find a unique symmetric equilibrium with ignorant voting public signal in favor of one particular alternative creates the bandwagon and underdog effects when the signal is sufficiently strong the majority outcome is biased this is a possible reason for persistence of public policies

expressive voting and government redistribution testing tullock s charity of the uncharitable models of expressive voting postulate that voters will consume ideological stances on issues by voting for them even when they are against the voter s own narrow selfinterest if the probability of being a decisive voter is low when a voter is unlikely to sway the outcome the odds that avoter will incur any real personal cost a higher tax burden for example from her own expressive vote is small we testand find support for tullock s straightforward empiricalimplication of this model that government welfare transfer payments are inversely related to the probability of being thedecisive voter

turnout in gubernatorial and senatorial primary and general elections in the south 1922 90 a rational choice model of the effects of short run and long run electoral competition on relative turnout using data on non presidential year elections for governor and u s senators in eight southern states over the period 1922 1990 we provide a rational choice inspired model of the factors that should be expected to affect the relative levels of turnout in primaries as compared to general elections both v o key and anthony downs have argued that voters will be more likely to participate in the elections in which they can most expect to be decisive v o key 1949 proposed that when general elections are usually lop sided because of one party dominance of a state s politics the primary of the dominant party of the state should have a higher turnout than the general election downs argued that turnout should be higher in competitive elections our modelling combines these ideas we use as our dependent variable the ratio of primary to general election turnout in each year we posit that this ratio will increase 1 the greater the degree of within party competition in the primary especially that within the dominant party of a state if there is one and 2 the weaker the degree of between party competition in the general election in addition to election specific effects we also posit long run effects such that the ratio for the offices of governor and u s senator will be affected not merely by the degrees of competition within and between parties specific to any given election but also by the long run trends in party competition this hypothesis leads us to expect that 3 in the south with the rise of the republican party the ratio of primary to general election turnout should decline over time all of our expectations about the links between turnout and competition are strongly supported we argue that rational choice models of turnout perform quite well when we view them in a comparative statics perspective rather than using them to make predictions about who will and who will not vote in any given election

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

context dependent preferences the standard theory of choice based on value maximization associates with each option a real value such that given an offered set the decision maker chooses the option with the highest value despite its simplicity and intuitive appeal there is a growing body of data that is inconsistent with this theory in particular the relative attractiveness of x compared to y often depends on the presence or absence of a third option z and the market share of an option can actually be increased by enlarging the offered set we review recent empirical findings that are inconsistent with value maximization and present a context dependent model that expresses the value of each option as an additive combination of two components a contingent weighting process that captures the effect of the background context and a binary comparison process that describes the effect of the local context the model accounts for observed violations of the standard theory and provides a framework for analyzing context dependent p

the paradox of voting intelligently classical economic models predict far less voting than happens in practice expressive voting may partly explain the divergence but some who are generally uninterested in politics and thus unlikely to take elections as an important form of personal expression nevertheless vote one possible explanation is that these voters overestimate the instrumental outcome changing consequences of voting such systematic misperception may be more likely among those with less cognitive capacity analysis of responses to the american national election studies confirms this hypothesis while intelligence and interest both increase the likelihood of voting the combination enhances the likelihood of turnout still further

abstention in elections with asymmetric information and diverse preferences we analyze a model of a two candidate election with costless voting in which voters have asymmetric information and diverse preferences we demonstrate that a strictly positive fraction of the electorate will abstain and that nevertheless elections effectively aggregate voters private information using examples we show that more informed voters are more likely to vote than their less informed counterparts increasing the fraction of the electorate that is informed however may lead to higher levels of abstention we conclude by showing that a biased distribution of information can lead to a biased voting population but does not lead to biased outcomes

incompetence alienation or calculation explaining levels of invalid ballots and extra parliamentary votes this article focuses on the casting of invalid ballots and voting for extra parliamentary parties drawing on evidence from more than 200 elections in western europe australia new zealand and the americas during the 1980 2000 period it tests how well four sets of factors serve as explanations for the extent of such behavior in parliamentary contests the main finding is that the structure of political competition provides an important explanation for extra parliamentary voting and in particular the number of invalid ballots thus rather than being the unfortunate circumstances of an uninformed or incompetent electorate these forms of voting to a large extent appear to reflect a political situation that offers voters little effective choice in the form of clear alternatives

everyone likes a winner an empirical test of the effect of electoral closeness on turnout in a context of expressive voting under instrumental voting closer elections are expected to have higher turnout under expressive voting however turnout may increase with decreasing closeness when voters have a preference for winners an empirical test using data on belgian municipal elections supports this we find that turnout reaches a local maximum when the largest party in the election obtains just over 52 of the seats and then falls supporting the instrumental closeness argument there is however another turning point the presence of a highly dominating party receiving at least two thirds of the votes stimulates turnout despite the fact that dominance implies lower closeness

the size of government in majoritarian and consensus democracies this article looks at the effect of democratic institutions on the size of government with the help of the ordinary least squares regression analysis of data from the organization for economic cooperation and development oecd countries from 1974 to 1995 the study provides considerable evidence that the variance in the type of democracy measured by the lijphart index of majoritarian consensus political institutions has a systematic effect on the variance in the size of government measured both by total government outlays as well as total government revenue as a percentage of gross domestic product the article further argues that such institutional effects on the size of government are strengthened by partisan politics more specifically the analysis demonstrates the presence of the multiplicative interaction effect of the mutually reinforcing nature between the institutional structure and partisan composition of government in their association with the size of government

mandatory versus voluntary labelling of genetically modified food evidence from an economic experiment opponents of the voluntary labelling scheme for genetically modified gm food products often argue that consumers have the right to know and therefore advocate mandatory labelling in this article we argue against this line of reasoning using experimental auctions we show that the quality of the signal generated by a mandatory labelling scheme is affected by the number of labels in the market if there are two labels one for gm products and one for non gm products mandatory and voluntary labelling schemes generate a similar degree of uncertainty about the quality of products that do not carry a label

existence and welfare properties of equilibrium in an exchange economy with multiple divisible indivisible commodities and linear production technologies abstract in this paper we consider a class of economies with a finite number of divisible commodities linear production technologies and indivisible goods and a finite number of agents this class contains several well known economies with indivisible goods and money as special cases it is shown that if the utility functions are continuous on the divisible commodities and are weakly monotonic both on one of the divisible commodities and on all the indivisible commodities if each agent initially owns a sufficient amount of one of the divisible commodities and if a no production without input like assumption on the production sector holds then there exists a competitive equilibrium for any economy in this class the usual convexity assumption is not needed here furthermore by imposing strong monotonicity on one of the divisible commodities we show that any competitive equilibrium is in the core of the economy and therefore the first theorem of welfare also holds we further obtain a second welfare theorem stating that under some conditions a pareto efficient allocation can be sustained by a competitive equilibrium allocation for some well chosen redistribution of the total initial endowments journal of economic literature classification numbers d4 d46 d5 d51 d6 d61

elections in the arab world why do citizens turn out this article examines the determinants of voting in competitive authoritarian regimes in the arab world in contrast to scholars who view elections in the arab world purely as patronage contests we argue that citizens also care about policy outputs and use turnout as a way to signal their approval or disapproval with the regime we draw on the literature on economic voting in democratic regimes to develop an argument about economic voting under authoritarian conditions and we propose a mediation model to get at the mechanisms of economic voting we test our argument with original data based on surveys conducted in seven arab countries between 2006 and 2009 our results show that although patronage helps to explain turnout especially among high income citizens policy outcomes are also important in the calculus of voting most voters turn out to vote to show approval of the regime and its economic performance

does political knowledge increase turnout evidence from the 1997 british general election a number of recent formal models predict a positive effect of political knowledge on turnout both information acquisition and turnout however are likely to be determined by a similar set of variables rendering hard the identification of a causal link in empirical investigations available empirical regularities should therefore be interpreted as mere correlations i address this problem by using an intrumental variables approach where the instruments are represented by various proxies of information supply on mass media using survey data from the 1997 british general election study i show that political knowledge has a sizeable influence on the probability of voting and that mass media play an important role in influencing political participation

context dependent voting and political ambiguity abstract in recent decades psychologists have shown that the standard model of individual choice is often violated one regularly observed violation is that choices are influenced by the decision context to incorporate these effects into politics we introduce a theory of context dependent voting and apply it to the puzzle of why candidates are so frequently ambiguous in their policy pronouncements we show that context dependent voters develop a taste for ambiguity even when they evaluate distances quadratically and exhibit traditional risk aversion turning to aggregate effects we incorporate context dependent voting into a model of electoral competition and show that strategic candidates respond in equilibrium to context dependent voters by offering ambiguous platforms thereby affecting the policy outcome

schooling political participation and the economy abstract we investigate how the link between individual schooling and political participation is affected by country characteristics using individual survey data we find that political participation is more responsive to schooling in land abundant countries and less responsive in human capital abundant countries even while controlling for country political institutions and cultural attitudes we find related evidence that political participation is less responsive to schooling in countries with a higher skill premium as well as within countries for individuals in skilled occupations the evidence motivates a theoretical explanation in which patterns of political participation are influenced by the opportunity cost of engaging in political rather than production activities

declining voter turnout in advanced industrial democracies 1950 to 1997 the effects of declining group mobilization past comparative voting behavior research has revealed that electoral institutions can explain much of the variation in voter turnout between nations this study takes an alternative and dynamic approach by identifying and explaining a pattern of turnout decline within industrial democracies which is beyond purely institutional explanation multivariate analysis of a pooled cross section of 18 industrial democracies between 1950 and 1997 suggests that turnout decline can best be explained in terms of changing patterns of group mobilization and electorate demographics the authors specifically point to the decline of unions and labor parties which have traditionally been associated with the mobilization of peripheral voters and the real increases in the cost of mobilization the authors control for institutional changes and find that they are less useful in explaining variation in turnout within advanced industrial democracies

consumer willingness to pay for genetically modified food in kenya genetically modified gm crops are popular in many regions of the world but their deployment in africa is hindered by safety concerns and regulatory issues although the continent is in dire need of boosting its food production although consumers acceptance of gm food has been analyzed in many continents no such studies have been conducted in africa therefore a survey of 604 consumers was conducted in nairobi kenya in 2003 to gauge consumers awareness of gm crops their willingness to pay wtp for gm food and the factors that influence their wtp consumers knowledge of gm crops was limited and only 38 of the 604 respondents were aware of gm crops people in higher education and income groups were more aware than others regardless people were generally appreciative of the technology and a large majority 68 would be willing to buy gm maize meal at the same price as their favorite brand consumers were however concerned about possible side effects especially on the environment and biodiversity wtp was estimated using a double bounded dichotomous choice model and the mean wtp was found to be 13 8 higher than the average price of non gm maize meal perceptions of health risk and ethical and equity concerns had a negative influence on the likelihood of purchasing gm maize meal whereas trust in government to ensure food quality had a positive influence on wtp people with at least some secondary education and those in the high income category were more likely to purchase gm maize meal at the same price the study concludes that because awareness is still low appropriate communications are needed to involve the consumer in the debate consumers acceptance in this study was high but the research needs to be expanded to rural areas where most consumers live and other survey methods need to be explored

incorporating groups into rational choice explanations of turnout an empirical test this study examines the problem of voter turnout from a rational choice perspective it reviews the paradox of voting and finds one model which incorporates the role of intermediary social groups and leaders to be a promising solution it tests the hypothesis that leader mobilization increases voter turnout using an ecological analysis of turnout in five montreal ethnic communities during three recent elections the 1993 canadian federal the 1994 quebec provincial and the 1994 montreal municipal elections data on mobilization are taken from semi directed interviews with association leaders in each community the results compare predicted and actual rankings of turnout for each community and election the overall results are weak indicating that the model does a poor job of predicting voter turnout

why noncompetitive states are so important for understanding the outcomes of competitive elections the electoral college 1868 2016 brams and kilgour public choice 170 99 113 2017 begin their recent essay on the electoral college ec by pointing out the obvious but nonetheless regularly neglected fact that noncompetitive states may have a decisive impact on ec outcomes and shape the electoral strategies of the candidates in the competitive states especially if there is asymmetry in the partisan balances in the non competitive states their contribution is to offer combinatorics insights into the implications of such asymmetries in the form of three new indicators winningness vulnerability and fragility they then explore the magnitude and effects of these three measures for the presidential elections of 2000 2004 2008 and 2012 the major contribution of this note is to extend their analyses of these measures to an additional 34 elections every election in the modern two party post civil war era from 1868 to 2016 we find the winningness measure to predict very well over the entire set of 38 presidential elections inspired by their work we also offer a new and simpler metric for partisan asymmetries in noncompetitive states and show how it can predict the expected closeness of ec outcomes as well or better than the more complex combinatorics measures they propose

a deeper look at the proportionality turnout nexus evidence that turnout is higher under proportional representation pr than in majoritarian elections is overwhelming yet previous research has largely failed to explain why one line of argument maintains that higher turnout under pr is a by product of larger party systems however a larger number of parties has been demonstrated to depress turnout alternatively it is argued that majoritarian electoral systems tend to produce safe seats and that voters have little incentive to turn out there thus uneven turnout over electoral districts due to variable intensities of local competition is made responsible for the lower overall turnout empirical evidence on this conjecture is scant this article scrutinizes the relationship between electoral rules competition and turnout with district level data from 31 national elections results from a heteroscedastic model indicate that lower net turnout in majoritarian systems is indeed a consequence of uneven turnout over districts due to variable levels of lo

on the theory of strategic voting many analyses of plurality rule elections predict the complete coor dination of strategic voting and hence support for only two candidates here i suggest that stable multi candidate support will arise in equilibrium a group of voters must partially coordinate behind one of two challenging candidates in order to dislodge a disliked incumbent in a departure from existing models the popular support for each challenger is uncertain this support must be inferred from the private observation of informative signals such as the social communication of pref erences throughout the electorate or the imperfect observation of opinion polls the uniquely stable voting equilibrium entails only limited strategic voting and hence incomplete coordination this is due to the surprising presence of negative feed back an increase in the degree of strategic voting by others reduces the incentives for an individual to vote strategically the incentive to vote strategically is lower in relatively marginal elections after controlling for the distance from contention of a trailing preferred challenger a calibration of the model applied to the uk general election of 1997 is consistent with the impact of strategic voting and the reported accuracy of voters understanding of the electoral situation it suggests that nearly 50 seats may have been lost by the conservative party due to strategic voting 1 plurality rule elections and strategic voting 1 1 strategic voting and duverger s law plurality rule elections where the winner is the candidate who receives the largest number of votes are vulnerable to strategic voting a voter might well switch away from her preferred candidate and toward a perceived leader in the hope of exerting a greater influence over the outcome of the election this phenomenon has long been the focus of both economic and political scientific study in an influential essay riker 1982b cited droop s 1871 eloquent exposition of the strategic voting problem 1 i oer my grateful thanks to the many friends colleagues seminar participants referees and editors who have oered insightful comments during the long gestation of this paper its antecedents and companion work special thanks go to steve fisher whose empirical analysis of strategic voting raised many of the questions that i seek to answer in this paper and to chris wallace this particular paper brings together much of the analysis previously circulated in the papers a new theory of strategic voting strategic voting under the qualified majority rule and idiosyncrasy information and the impact of strategic voting

the performance of rational voter models in recent presidential elections in an economic theory of democracy downs hypothesized that rational utility maximizing citizens would calculate the benefits from voting as opposed to abstaining altogether and then vote if this expected benefit exceeded voting cost this hypothesis is logically derived from economic principles of rational behavior but is counterintuitive even if the utility increment is plausibly large the probability of casting a pivotal tie breaking vote in any sizable polity is minute hence the expected benefit will be less than the time cost of voting and no rational person will vote nevertheless a number of statistical studies have found that voter turnout does respond to differences in the probability of casting a decisive vote even though that probability may be small this article uses data gathered at the state level from the 1968 1972 1976 and 1980 general elections to reestimate the relationship between voter turnout and the probable closeness of the election pooled data least squares dummy variable lsdv regressions are used whenever preliminary tests indicate that such pooling is permissible the empirical results suggest that the relationship between closeness and turnout is weak unstable or nonexistent in all of the models tested

choosing not to choose on the link between information and abstention abstract we use a dataset that allows us to circumvent a number of estimation difficulties that have plagued previous studies of the relationship between information and abstention our results show that information is a major determinant of abstention

if people vote because they like to then why do so many of them lie of those eligible about 40 do not vote in presidential elections when asked about a quarter of those nonvoters will lie to the survey takers and claim that they did increases in education are associated with higher voting rates and lower rates of lying overall but with increased rates of lying conditional on not voting this paper proposes a model of voter turnout in which people who claim to vote get praise from other citizens those who lie must bear the cost of lying the model has a stable equilibrium with positive rates of voting honest non voting and lying reasonable parameter changes produce changes in these proportions in the same direction as the changes actually observed across education levels i argue that a model where people vote because they want to be known as voters provides a better explanation for observed voting behavior than does a model where people vote because they want to vote

the welfare state turnout and the economy a comparative analysis while the economic voting literature is voluminous comparatively little attention has been paid to the question of how or whether the economy affects turnout i address this issue by examining national elections in 29 countries using time series data the initial findings are replicated by a case study of american presidential and midterm elections since 1896 it is argued that the effect of economic adversity depends upon the degree of welfare state development this relationship is argued to be nonlinear so that mobilization occurs at either extreme while withdrawal obtains in the middle range the importance to democratic theory the study of elections and the politics of welfare policy are discussed

perspectives on positive political economy this volume serves as an introduction to the field of positive political economy and the economic and political processes with which it is concerned this new research tradition is distinct from both normative and historical approaches to political economy grounded in the rational actor methodology of microeconomics positive political economy is the study of rational decisions in a context of political and economic institutions more analytical than traditional approaches it is concerned with the derivation of principles and propositions against which real world experience may be compared its focus is on empirical regularities and its goal is theoretical explanation the field has focused on three main areas of research models of collective action constraints on competitive market processes and the analysis of transaction costs developments in all of these areas are covered in the book the first part of the volume surveys the field while the second part displays positive political economy at work examining a variety of subjects the final part contains essays by leading political economists on the theoretical foundations of the field

the ecological fallacy revisited aggregate versus individual level findings on economics and elections and sociotropic voting several aggregate level studies have found a relationship between macroeconomic conditions and election outcomes operating in intuitively plausible directions more recent survey based studies however have been unable to detect any comparable relationship operating at the individual voter level this persistent discrepancy is puzzling one recently proposed explanation for it is that voters actually behave in an altruistic or sociotropic fashion responding to economic events only as they affect the general welfare rather than in terms of self interested pocketbook considerations it is argued here that the discrepancies between the macro and micro level studies are a statistical artifact arising from the fact that observable changes in individual welfare actually consist of two unobservable components a government induced and politically relevant component and an exogenous component caused by life cycle and other politically irrelevant factors it is shown that because of this individual level cross sectional estimates of the effects of welfare changes on voting are badly biased and are essentially unrelated to the true values of the behavioral parameters of interest they will generally be considerable underestimates and may even be of the wrong sign an aggregate level time series analysis on the other hand will often yield reasonably good if somewhat attenuated estimates of the underlying individual level effects of interest thus in this case individual behavior is best investigated with aggregate rather than individual level data it is also shown that the evidence for sociotropic voting is artifactual in the sense that the various findings and evidence which ostensibly show sociotropic behavior are all perfectly compatible with the null hypothesis of self interested pocketbook voting

value elicitation in retail and laboratory environments abstract an increasing number of studies have begun conducting economic experiments in field rather than laboratory settings we directly compare results from laboratory and field valuation experiments after controlling for unengaged bidders results indicate field valuations were greater than laboratory valuations results are discussed in the context of recent literature on commitment costs

rational choice theory and the paradox of not voting at least since downs s 1957 seminal work an economic theory of democracy rational choice theorists have appreciated the paradox of not voting in a large election the probability that an individual vote might change the election outcome is vanishingly small if each person only votes for the purpose of influencing the election outcome then even a small cost to vote like a minor schedule conflict or mildly bad weather should dissuade anyone from voting yet it seems that many people will put up with long lines daunting registration requirements and even the threat of physical violence or arrest in order to vote given the central place of voting within political economy the lack of an adequate rational choice model of large elections with costly voting presents an obvious problem for the most part theorists have bypassed the turnout problem either by eliminating voters as strategic actors or by assuming that the decision to vote is independent of other strategic choices the problem with the first approach is that the empirical literature on voting behavior provides considerable evidence of apparently strategic behavior in primary elections there is evidence that voters condition their vote choice on the viability of candidates abramson aldrich paolino and rohde 1992 in a seminal and comprehensive study cox 1997 shows that voting patterns and election outcomes are broadly consistent with patterns of behavior predicted by strategic voting models for example under plurality rule in which the candidate with the most votes wins the election

unequal participation democracy s unresolved dilemma presidential address american political science association 1996 low voter turnout is a serious democratic problem for five reasons 1 it means unequal turnout that is systematically biased against less well to do citizens 2 unequal turnout spells unequal political influence 3 u s voter turnout is especially low but measured as percent of voting age population it is also relatively low in most other countries 4 turnout in midterm regional local and supranational elections less salient but by no means unimportant elections tends to be especially poor 5 turnout appears to be declining everywhere the problem of inequality can be solved by institutional mechanisms that maximize turnout one option is the combination of voter friendly registration rules proportional representation infrequent elections weekend voting and holding less salient elections concurrently with the most important national elections the other option which can maximize turnout by itself is compulsory voting its advantages far outweigh the normative and practical objections to it

the role of political parties an analysis based on transaction costs this paper explores the proposition that political parties reduce the transaction costs of electoral participation political parties provide a low cost signal of a candidate s policies and personal characteristics and in this way reduce voters information costs with reference to transaction cost economics political parties offer an implicit contract between voters and politicians and thereby reduce the scope for opportunism by politicians this impact on transaction costs is important in any evaluation of public policy towards political parties

parties as political intermediaries this paper argues that parties regulate competition among like minded factions so as to enhance reputation building by and voter trust in the politicians standing for a given cause while intra and interparty competition contributes to keeping politicians on their toes unbridled competition may encourage politicians to challenge good platforms and to wage competition along socially suboptimal dimensions for example by privileging form over content the paper builds a simple model of intraparty competition and studies whether various hierarchical or democratic party institutions constitute an efe cient form of party governance the paper shows that intraparty disagreements when they occur hurt the party s position in the general election but that their possibility enhances party image and that parties must be able to avoid behind the scene allocations of portfolios and spoils in order to be credible last it analyzes the impact of political polarization and interparty competition on the choice of party governance

economic performance and turnout at national and local elections this paper analyzes the impact of economic performance on voter turnout we estimate an economic turnout model in which local economic variables are included in quadratic form so that non linear effects can be taken into account we use panel datasets covering municipalities from 1979 to 2005 and cross sections of parishes freguesias to analyze the determinants of turnout at portuguese municipal and legislative elections the empirical results indicate that the performance of the national economy is important only in legislative elections and that the regional and local unemployment rates tend to have non linear relationships to turnout the results obtained for flemish municipalities also provide evidence in favor of a non linear effect of unemployment on turnout

political rents and voter information in search equilibrium abstract political parties committed to grab rents may run for election and even win if citizens are uninformed but how is the political equilibrium affected if citizens can mitigate this information problem through costly information search we propose a political equilibrium theory with endogenous information search and turnout we show that i the political equilibrium generates political uncertainty characterized by a distribution of rent policies i i the expectation of this rent distribution is inversely u shaped in the information search cost i i i turnout is lower and rents are higher the more proportional is the electoral system

voter turnout and the principle of one person one vote empirical evidence from the constituency freeze in india this article uses panel data from national and state elections in india during the period 1977 2007 to examine the effect of inequality in constituency population size on voter turnout during this period constituency boundaries in india remained fixed as a result differences in population size between constituencies increased thus changing the value of a single vote using this large variation in population size and informative data this article carefully distinguishes the effect of population size from other factors we find that an increase of one million electorates decreases voter turnout by 12 27 in addition we find that the share of votes gained by national political parties is greater in small population constituencies this suggests that political parties direct their efforts in electoral campaigns preferentially to less populous constituencies as a result voters in small constituencies are more likely to participate in elections

electoral institutions and the politics of coalitions why some democracies redistribute more than others standard political economy models of redistribution notably that of meltzer and richard 1981 fail to account for the remarkable variance in government redistribution across democracies we develop a general model of redistribution that explains why some democratic governments are more prone to redistribute than others we show that the electoral system plays a key role because it shapes the nature of political parties and the composition of governing coalitions hence redistribution our argument implies 1 that center left governments dominate under pr systems whereas center right governments dominate under majoritarian systems and 2 that pr systems redistribute more than majoritarian systems we test our argument on panel data for redistribution government partisanship and electoral system in advanced democracies w hy do some countries redistribute more than others most work on the politics of redistribution starts from the premise that democratic institutions empower those who stand to benefit from redistribution the basic logic is succinctly captured in the meltzer richard 1981 model where the voter with the median income is also the decisive voter with a typical right skewed distribution of income the median voter will push for redistributive spending up to the point where the benefit of such spending to the median voter is outweighed by the efficiency costs of distortionary taxation this argument implies that redistibution is much greater in democracies than in nondemocracies at least of the right authoritarian variety and that among the latter inegalitarian societies redistribute more than egalitarian ones there is some evidence to supportthefirstimplication althoughitisdisputed see ross 2005 but most of the variance in redistribution is probably within the same regime type according to datafromtheluxembourgincomestudy forexample the reduction in the poverty rate in united states as a result of taxation and transfers was 13 in 1994 whereas the comparable figure for sweden was 82 thepovertyrateisthepercentageofhouseholdsbelow 50 of the median income to explain this variance we have to look at political and economic differences

on a market for coalitions with indivisible agents and lotteries abstract given a game the set of joint lotteries over partitions of the agents of any subgame induces a subset of the vectors of balancing weights for the subgame games whose subgames are all balanced with respect to these vectors of balancing weights are called totally l balanced games we show that such games are precisely the ones that can be generated from direct lottery markets total l balancedness is equivalent to superadditivity thus many interesting games that are not totally balanced but are superadditive can be generated from direct lottery markets we also show that the core of a game coincides with the set of lottery equilibrium utility vectors of its direct lottery market journal of economic literatureclassification numbers c71 d51

aggregating information by voting the wisdom of the experts versus the wisdom of the masses this article analyzes participation and information aggregation in a common value election with continuous private signals in equilibrium some citizens ignore their private information and abstain from voting in deference to those with higher quality signals even as the number of highly informed peers grows large however citizens with only moderate expertise continue voting so that voter participation remains at realistic levels e g 50 to 60 percent for simple examples the precise level of voter turnout along with the margin of victory are determined by the distribution of expertise improving a voter s information makes her more willing to vote consistent with a growing body of empirical evidence but makes her peers more willing to abstain providing a new explanation for various empirical patterns of voting equilibrium participation is optimal even though the marginal voter may have very little e g below average expertise and even though nonvoters information is not utilized copyright oxford university press