Laboratory Experiments in Political Economy

Abstract

This article summarizes a small part of the literature on laboratory experiments in political economy. The experiments discussed are primarily aimed at testing predictions of equilibrium models of voting in committees and elections. The specific topics discussed are voter turnout, the Condorcet jury theorem, and the swing voter's curse. The latter two topics address questions of information aggregation by voting rules. All the experiments find significant evidence of strategic voting and, with a few exceptions, find support for the equilibrium predictions of the theories.