Optimal voting turnouts

Abstract

There is an extensive and far-ranging literature concerned with positive aspects of election turnouts, dealing with such questions as the number of people who vote, the composition of the voting population, whether it is narrowly 'rational' for those who vote to do so, and so on. l The normative properties of election turnouts and alternative institutional arrangements for influencing them have, by contrast, been largely neglected. A notable exception to this neglect is Gordon Tultock's recent sequence of papers, and G~/rtner's associated comments on optimal poll taxes [Tullock, 1975, 1976 and 1977; see also G//rtner, 1976 and 1977]. Tutlock's general conclusion is that turnouts should be restricted below the levels that would obtain if elections were financed out of general revenue, and hence that some poll tax is required. The arguments which Tullock uses to support this conclusion are two fold. First, the voting process itself is costly in terms of the provision of polling booths, ballot papers, vote-counting machines, scrutineers and so on-and presumably, having greater numbers from the enfranchised population exercising their voting rights will increase this cost. At the optimal turnout, the net benefits from an extra individual's exercise of his vote must exactly offset the incremental processing cost. Second, Tullock argues, since any individual's political "power," defined as the probability that his vote will be decisive, decreases with