Voting and Decision Making
Paper Session
Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2021 3:45 PM - 5:45 PM (EST)
- Chair: Louis Kaplow, Harvard University
On the Representativeness of Voter Turnout
Abstract
Prominent theory research on voting uses models in which expected pivotality drives voters' turnout decisions and hence determines voting outcomes. It is recognized, however, that such work is at odds with Downs's paradox: in practice, many individuals turn out for reasons unrelated to pivotality, and their votes overwhelm the forces analyzed in pivotality-based models. Accordingly, we examine a complementary model of large-$N$ elections at the opposite end of the spectrum, where pivotality effects vanish and turnout is driven entirely by individuals' direct costs and benefits from the act of voting itself. Under certain conditions, the level of turnout is irrelevant to representativeness and thus to voting outcomes. Under others, ``anything is possible"; starting with any given distribution of preferences in the underlying population, there can arise any other distribution of preferences in the turnout set and thus any outcome within the range of the voting mechanism. Particular skews in terms of representativeness are characterized. The introduction of noise in the relationship between underlying preferences and individuals' direct costs and benefits from voting produces, in the limit, fully representative turnout. To illustrate the potential disconnect between the level of turnout (a focus of much empirical literature) and representativeness, we present a simple example in which, as noise increases, the turnout level monotonically falls yet representativeness monotonically rises.Checks and Balances and Vote Buying in Legislatures
Abstract
Why do checks and balances work well in some countries, but not in others? This paper studies the conditions under which a system of checks and balances may be beneficial to a society. Our analysis yields the result that, under certain circumstances, checks and balances may actually lead to more corruption by stimulating vote buying in the legislature. We show that such perverse equilibrium is more likely to exist the larger the degree of political polarization in the society, the more unequal the distribution of resources under the status quo and the less career-oriented are the legislators. Our theoretical analysis is consistent with the main stylized facts emerging from the study of the "mensalão" scandal in Brazil.Global Manipulation by Local Obfuscation
Abstract
We study information design in a regime change context. A continuum of agents simultaneously choose whether to attack the current regime and will succeed if and only if the mass of attackers outweighs the regime’s strength. A designer manipulates information about the regime’s strength to maintain the status quo. The optimal information structure exhibits local obfuscation, some agents receive a signal matching the true strength of the status quo, and others receive an elevated signal professing slightly higher strength.JEL Classifications
- P1 - Capitalist Systems