Rational Voter Research Articles

Do Voters Vote For Government Coalitions?

In many countries, elections produce coalition governments. Downs points out that in such cases the rational voter needs to determine what coalitions are possible, i.e. to ascertain their probability and to anticipate the policy compromises that they entail. Downs adds that this may be too complex a task and concludes that ‘most voters do not vote as though elections were government-selection mechanisms’ (Downs, 1957: 300). We test Downs' ‘pessimistic’ conclusion in the case of the 2003 Israeli election, an election that was bound to produce a coalition government and in which the issue of what the possible coalitions were was at the forefront of the campaign. We show that voters' views about the coalitions that could be formed after the election had an independent effect on vote choice, over and above their views about the parties, the leaders and their ideological orientations. We estimate that for one voter out of ten, coalition preferences were a decisive consideration, that is, they induced the voter to support a party other than the most preferred one. For many others, they were a factor, though perhaps not the dominant one. Furthermore, the least informed were as prone to vote on the basis of coalition preferences as the most informed. Our evidence disconfirms Downs' pessimistic view that voters will decide not to care about the formation of government. When they are provided with sufficient information about the possible options, voters think ahead about the coalitions that may be formed after the election.

Community size, heterogeneity and voter turnouts

Numerous studies have found a negative relationship between the closeness of an election, the size of the electorate and voter turnout. It is often claimed that this relationship supports the rational voter hypothesis, with closeness and size proxying for the decisiveness of a vote. We offer a different interpretation. Larger communities are more heterogeneous than smaller ones, and turnouts are inversely related to the heterogeneity of a community. We present empirical support for this hypothesis using data for voter turnouts in Norwegian school language referendums. Community size is found to have a negative effect on voter turnouts, even after accounting for the probability of a single vote being decisive and the linguistic dimension of this heterogeneity. Our findings question the adequacy of the turnout regression in testing the rational voter hypothesis, as neither a positive correlation between closeness and turnout, nor a negative correlation between size and turnout can be exclusively attributed to instrumental voting.

Indecision Theory: Weight of Evidence and Voting Behavior

AbstractIn this paper, we show how to incorporate weight of evidence, or ambiguity, into a model of voting behavior. We do so in the context of the turnout decision of instrumentally rational voters who differ in their perception of the ambiguity of the candidates' policy positions. Ambiguity is reflected by the fact that the voter's beliefs are given by a set of probabilities, each of which represents in the voter's mind a different possible scenario. We show that a voter who is averse to ambiguity considers abstention strictly optimal when the candidates' policy positions are both ambiguous and they are “ambiguity complements.” Abstaining is preferred since it is tantamount to mixing the prospects embodied by the two candidates, thus enabling the voter to “hedge” the candidates' ambiguity.

Policy myopia and economic growth

We develop a theory of second best policy myopia. Policy myopia arises when rational voters allow politicians to bias public investments towards short-term investments. We demonstrate that policy myopia is not an inevitable implication of the fact that voters cannot observe immediately how much their politicians invested in certain types of public goods; rather it is the interaction between observation lags, economic growth and binding revenue constraints that forces rational voters to accept a short-term bias. We argue that growth in government eventually leads to policy myopia.

Determinants of Geographic Differentials in the Voter Participation Rate

Voter participation rates vary widely across the 50 states. This empirical study seeks, within the context of a broadened version of the ‘rational voter model,’ to identify determinants of this interstate variation. Using the 2004 general election as the study period, it is found that the voter participation rate in a state is positively related to the percent of the state's adult population with at least a high school education, the state's unemployment rate, the percent of the state's population age 65 and older, and the female labor force participation rate in the state. In addition, it is found that voter turnout in a state is negatively related to the state's median family income and the percentage of its population that is Hispanic.

Some Thoughts on the Voting Process

Since the rational voter model was first introduced, the issue of voting determinants has been the subject of extensive study. Moreover, the significance of the democratic process has long been a subject of extensive study and controversy. This study addresses a related pair of issues and offers some challenges for students of voting, the voting process, and the nature of democracy to ponder. The two issues are: (1) what does democracy mean? and (2) which is the best or least bad of these various choices.

Who Misvotes? The Effect of Differential Cognition Costs on Election Outcomes

If voters are fully rational and have negligible cognition costs, ballot layout should not affect election outcomes. In this paper, we explore deviations from rational voting using quasi-random variation in candidate name placement on ballots from the 2003 California Recall Election. We find that the voteshares of minor candidates almost double when their names are adjacent to the names of major candidates on a ballot. Voteshare gains are largest in precincts with high percentages of Democratic, Hispanic, low-income, non-English speaking, poorly educated, or young voters. A major candidate that attracts a disproportionate share of voters from these types of precincts faces a systematic electoral disadvantage. If the Republican frontrunner Arnold Schwarzenegger and Democratic frontrunner Cruz Bustamante had been in a tie, adjacency misvoting would have given Schwarzenegger an edge of 0.06% of the voteshare. This gain in voteshare exceeds the margins of victory in the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election and the 2004 Washington Gubernatorial Election. We explore which voting technology platforms and brands mitigate misvoting.

Majority rip-off in referendum voting

Many democracies complement a parliamentarian system with elements of direct democracy, where the electorate decides on single issues by majority voting. A well-known paradox states that in a sequence of referenda one can get from an arbitrary original income distribution to one in which one player gets almost all the cake. In this paper we design a three-player game modelling the sequential modification mechanism. The strategic analysis reveals that the paradox survives even with rational strategic voters and though the right to propose is allocated to each player once: the last player receives almost the entire cake. The result can be extended to the three-party n-voter case and is for some cases similar when we consider a random rather than fixed sequence of proposers.

The Social Contract with Endogenous Sentiments

Moral values in‡uence individual behavior and social interactions. A specially signi…- cant instance is the case of moral values concerning work eort. Individuals determine what they take to be proper behaviour and judge the others, and themselves, accordingly. They increase their esteem — and self-esteem— for those who perform in excess of the standard and decrease their esteem for those who work less. These changes in self-esteem result from the self-regulatory emotions of guilt or pride extensively studied in Social Psychology. We examine the interactions between sentiments, individual behaviour and the social contract in a model of rational voting over redistribution where individual self-esteem and relative es- teem for others are endogenously determined. Individuals dier in their productivities. The desired extent of redistribution depends both on individual income and on individual atti- tudes toward others. We characterize the politico-economic equilibria in which sentiments, labor supply and redistribution are simultaneously determined. The model has two types of equilibria. In cohesive equilibria, all individuals conform to the standard of proper behav- iour, income inequality is low and social esteem is not biased toward any particular type. Under these conditions equilibrium redistribution increases in response to larger inequality. In a clustered equilibrium skilled workers work above the mean while unskilled workers work below. In such an equilibrium, income inequality is large and sentiments are biased in favor of the industrious. As inequality increases, this bias may eventually overtake the egoistic demand for greater taxation and equilibrium redistribution decreases. The type of equilibrium that emerges crucially depends on inequality. We contrast the predictions of the model with data on inequality, redistribution, work values and attitudes toward work and toward the poor for a set of OECD countries.

REAL EXCHANGE RATE CYCLES AROUND ELECTIONS

We develop the implications of devaluation cycles for real exchange rates in a two-sector small open economy with a cash-in-advance constraint. Policy-makers are office-motivated politicians. Voters have incomplete information on the competence and the opportunism of incumbents. Devaluation acts like a tax, and is politically costly because it can signal the government is incompetent. This provides incumbents an incentive to postpone devaluations, and can lead to an overvalued exchange rate before elections. We compare the implied cycle of appreciated/depreciated exchange rates with empirical evidence around elections from Latin America. THIS PAPER explores the behavior of real exchange rates around elections, in a model in which politicians are office-motivated. We show that politicians are often tempted to provoke real exchange rate cycles around elections, delaying depreciations until after elections have taken place. In addition, we present evidence on electoral cycles in real exchange rates in Latin America, which is consistent with the implications of the model. Unlike early opportunistic models on political cycles, such as Nordhaus (1975) and Lindbeck (1976) that assumed voters were myopic, here voters have asymmetric information regarding the competency of the incumbent. In this, our treatment of political budget cycles (PBCs) follows Rogoff and Sibert (1988) and Rogoff (1990), where cycles are the result of a signaling game between incumbents and forward-looking rational voters. In our model, voters are also assumed to have asymmetric information regarding the opportunism of politicians, although this second dimension of asymmetric information is not necessary to obtain budget cycles. 1 To study the behavior of the real exchange rate, we extend the Stein and Streb (2004) one-sector model, where incumbents have an incentive to lower the nominal rate of depreciation before elections to enhance their reputation of competency, to a two-sector model with tradable and non��

The dynamics of government

We model income redistribution with dynamic distortions as determined by rational voting without commitment among individuals of different types and income realizations. We find that redistribution is too persistent relative to that chosen by a planner with commitment. The difference is larger, the lower is the political influence of young agents, the lower is the altruistic concern for future generations, and the lower is risk-aversion. Furthermore, there tends to be too much redistribution in the political equilibrium. Finally, smooth preference aggregation, as under probabilistic voting, produces less persistence and does not admit multiple equilibria, which occur under majority-voting aggregation.

Policy Myopia and Economic Growth

We develop a theory of second best policy myopia. Policy myopia arises when rational voters allow politicians to bias public investments towards short-term investments. We demonstrate that policy myopia is not an inevitable implication of the fact that voters cannot observe immediately how much their politicians invest in certain types of public goods; rather it is the interaction between observation lags, economic growth and binding revenue constraints that forces rational voters to accept a short-term bias. We argue that growth in government and policy myopia are related social phenomena. The analysis is motivated by stylized facts about public spending patterns.

Strong Presidential Approval or Disapproval Influencing the Expected Benefits of Voting and the Voter Participation Rate

This empirical study seeks to broaden the interpretation of the rational voter model so as to identify and better understand key determinants of the expected benefits from voting and hence key determinants of the aggregate voter participation rate in the US. Using annual data for all years in the 1960–1997 study period, this study finds that the voter participation rate has been positively impacted by strong public approval or strong public disapproval of the incumbent President, a finding unique to this literature and study period. In addition, the aggregate voter participation rate has been positively impacted by such factors as the Gulf War, which is generally regarded as having been popular among the US electorate, and a rising unemployment rate. This study also finds the voter participation rate to have been negatively impacted by the public’s dissatisfaction with government, as well as by the Watergate scandal.

Re-examining Voter Turnout in Large Elections

A well-known shortcoming of rational voter models is that the equilibrium probability that an individual votes converges to zero as the population of citizens tends to infinity. We show that this does not - as is often suggested - imply that equilibrium voter turnout is insignificant in the limit. We characterize limiting equilibrium turnout and show that it may actually be arbitrarily large. Indeed, expected equilibrium turnout is shown to be closely approximated by 1/(2*pi *L^2), where L is the lowest possible realization of an individual's voting cost.

Would rational voters acquire costly information?

We analyze an election in which voters are uncertain about which of two alternatives is better for them. Voters can acquire some costly information about the alternatives. In agreement with Downs's rational ignorance hypothesis, individual investment in political information declines to zero as the number of voters increases. However, if the marginal cost of information is near zero for nearly irrelevant information, there is a sequence of equilibria such that the election outcome is likely to correspond to the interests of the majority for arbitrarily large numbers of voters. Thus, “rationally ignorant” voters are consistent with a well-informed electorate.

Signaling in Political Budget Cycles: How Far Are You Willing to Go?

AbstractA key assumption in the literature on political cycles with rational voters and opportunistic politicians is that opportunism is common knowledge. In this framework, political cycles have been interpreted as a signal of competency. However, if opportunism is not common knowledge, cycles may no longer indicate competency, but rather opportunism. This is because highly opportunistic incumbents are willing to go farther to be reelected. Since political cycles require discretionality to reallocate budget items, a decrease of discretionality curbs cycles. It may also make elections more effective at selecting competent incumbents.

Pressure Groups and Political Advertising: How Uninformed Voters Can Use Strategic Rules of Thumb

This paper shows how uninformed but rational voters can respond intelligently to political advertising. The paper models a situation where a candidate must rely on a pressure group for financing political advertising. The pressure group uses its power over the purse to influence the position chosen by the candidate. Nevertheless, when uninformed voters use a strategic rule of thumb, pressure-group contributions always move the outcome of the election closer to the median voter. By using such a rule of thumb, when there is advertising, uninformed voters can have the same influence on the election as informed voters.

Promising politicians, rational voters, and election outcomes

Overwhelming anecdotal evidence suggests that politicians often promise more during an election campaign than they are willing or able to deliver once elected. In this paper, we present two signaling models to explain this phenomenon. In the first model, two candidates maximize their share of the vote. In the second model both try to convince the median voter. In each model, candidates rationally distort their true policy position. Voters, however, are not fooled. Upon observing election promises, they can rationally infer the true position of each candidate. Hence, the election outcome is not affected.

The Spin Doctor Meets the Rational Voter: Electoral Competition with Agenda-Setting Effects

In a multidimensional policy space, citizens cast their vote on the basis of which policy issue they reckon as being more salient. An issue becomes salient if it is known that problems related to it have occurred, which deserve some policy action by the elected politician. Newspapers and TV news broadcasts provide pieces of news about which problems have taken place, but there is a limited amount of available space on each of them, so that an excluding choice must be made. I develop a simple model of electoral competition with agenda-setting effects. In a two-issue, one-newspaper environment, I define as spin the ability of the incumbent politician to make the story about the favorite issue sexier, so that it is published for sure, at the expense of the story about the other issue. As a function of the presence or lack of spin, the model offers testable predictions about the kind of news being published during the campaign, and the effects thereof on the electoral outcome. Moreover, the paper discusses the circumstances under which it would be ex ante optimal for the incumbent politician to commit not to engage himself in spin activity. This is true when the electorate is ideologically polarised.

Effects of Term Limits on Fiscal Performance: Evidence from Democratic Nations

Political reputation models feature forward-looking, rational voters who re-elect incumbents based on their estimate of an incumbent's ability level. Fiscal policy is one of the ways an incumbent establishes a reputation and thereby signals this ability level to voters. The reputation-building framework implies that term limits should affect fiscal performance; a term-limited incumbent places less value on reputation-building than an incumbent eligible for re-election does. We examine differences in fiscal performance in democratic countries under alternative executive term limit regimes. Our results generally agree with the prior findings of Besley and Case (1995a) who analyzed gubernatorial term limits in the American States. We provide new evidence that the fiscal effects of term limits differ under a two-term rule versus a single-term rule.