Abstract
AbstractPeople are commonly expected not to waste their vote on parties with small probabilities of being elected. Yet, many end up voting for underdogs. We argue that voters gauge the popular support for their preferred party from their social networks. When social networks function as echo chambers, a feature observed in real-life networks, voters overestimate underdogs’ chances of winning. We conduct voting experiments in which some treatment groups receive signals from a simulated network. We compare the effect of networks with a high degree of homogeneity against random networks. We find that homophilic networks increase the level of support for underdogs, which provides evidence to back up anecdotal claims that echo chambers foster the development of fringe parties.
Highlights
People are commonly expected not to waste their vote on parties with small probabilities of being elected
Exploring how social networks affect the vote is relevant given the growing role of social media in politics, which has reemphasized an earlier body of work documenting the influence of peer networks on political behavior (Huckfeldt and Sprague, 1995; Mutz, 2006; Sinclair, 2012; Ahn et al, 2014)
We examined the impact of social networks on the support for underdogs using laboratory experiments
Summary
People are commonly expected not to waste their vote on parties with small probabilities of being elected. In the first treatment group (random network), each voter observes the private values of two randomly selected peers among the six voters participating in the election. When exposed to a network of voters who have a strong preference for the underdog, the tendency to vote for that party doubles, to 43 percent.
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