Voters In Democracies Research Articles

Political information search in “noisy” online environments: Insights from an experiment examining older and younger adults’ searches on smartphones and laptops

ABSTRACT An important problem voters face is that they frequently encounter unfamiliar candidates and policies during elections. The Internet provides a solution to this problem by allowing voters to access vast amounts of information using communication technologies like laptops and smartphones. However, the online environment is “noisy,” containing information both relevant and irrelevant to any given query. Existing research has not examined whether voters are able to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant political information during online search and how this discrimination ability influences voting decisions. We conducted a preregistered experimental study (N = 128; 64 younger participants and 64 older participants) in which we created our own search engine and webpages about political candidates to examine people’s discrimination ability during search. We found that people’s ability to discriminate between relevant and irrelevant facts during search increased the likelihood that their later vote choices were influenced by relevant (instead of irrelevant) information. In addition, older and younger adults’ discrimination abilities did not differ between searches on smartphones or laptops. Our findings demonstrate a new way to integrate theories of political behavior and communication technology and highlight information search in “noisy” online environments as an important problem faced by voters in democracies.

An Epistemic Problem for Epistocracy

ABSTRACT Epistocracy, roughly amounts to distributing political power in accordance with each citizen’s competence for political decision-making. The problem, epistocrats hold, is that most voters in democracies are incompetent to vote. A central element of this diagnosis is that bad outcomes are largely attributable to lay citizens’ incapacity to choose the right means to foster their preferences. I call this the Preferences/Means Discrepancy. Based on this diagnosis, most epistocrats argue that the best way to improve outcomes is by implementing some form of restricted electorate constituted by those deemed competent to vote. In this paper I elucidate epistocrats’ understanding of competence to challenge the epistocratic idea of improving outcomes by restricting the electorate. I argue that the restricted electorate would fail to be competent under epistocrats’ own terms, because it is faced with an epistemic problem: The Information Gap Problem. Epistocrats most likely definition of competence seems to be to possess relevant information. However, a restricted electorate would be formed by a homogeneous elite, which would therefore have limited access to a key form of information, namely, lay citizens’ preferences. This gap of information questions the competence of the restricted electorate and makes epistocracy unsuited to address the Preferences/Means Discrepancy.

Precinct resources and voter wait times

The amount of time that voters wait in line while casting their ballots has been a matter of consternation in electorates across the world and a subject of ongoing academic research in the field of election administration. With this as context, we offer here a study of voting lines that combines observed voter arrival times and measures of precinct processes with simulation results. Empirically, we focus on the town of Hanover, New Hampshire, during the 2014 United States General Election. Voters in Hanover initially authenticate themselves to election officials, mark their ballots in secret, and finally insert said ballots into optical scan tabulating machines. These steps are reasonably generic, and thus the way we study Hanover voters is generalizable to the study of voters in democracies across the world. Our simulations show that line voting evolution can be studied after a simple data-collection plan is implemented, and we show how scholars and election officials can evaluate the effects of changing precinct resources, like the numbers of voter authentication stations and voting booths, on the formation and duration of voting lines.

Constitutions and Policy Comparisons

Voters in democracies can learn from the experience of neighbouring states: about policy in a direct democracy (`policy experimentation'), about the quality of their politicians in a representative democracy (`yardstick competition'). Learning between states creates spillovers from policy choice, and also from constitutional choice. I model these spillovers in a simple principal-agent framework, and show that voter welfare may be maximized by a mixture of representative and direct democratic states. Because of this, empirical work examining voter welfare under direct democracy may need to be reinterpreted. Also, I show that the optimal mix of constitutions cannot always be achieved in a constitutional choice equilibrium involving many states.

Dictators, development, and the virtue of political instability

A large body of literature stresses the benefits of regime stability for economic growth in poor countries. This view, however, discounts the gains from threats to regime security when populations living under dictatorial regimes cannot benefit from the disciplining of political competition available to voters in democracies. This paper applies a model of economic growth to study the sources of the differences in economic performance and repression policy among dictatorships as well as the parallel in dictatorial regimes of the benefits achieved through political competition in democracies. Threats to the security of dictatorial regimes are shown to be a means of benefiting the population through the responses of the regime.

Constitutions and Policy Comparisons: Direct and Representative Democracy when States Learn from Their Neighbours

Voters in democracies can learn from the experience of neighbouring states: about policy in a direct democracy (policy experimentation), about the quality of their politicians in a representative democracy (yardstick competition). Learning between states creates spillovers from policy choice, and also from constitutional choice. I model these spillovers in a simple principal-agent framework, and show that voter welfare may be maximized by a mixture of representative and direct democratic states. Because of this, empirical work examining voter welfare under direct democracy may need to be reinterpreted. Also, I show that the optimal mix of constitutions cannot always be achieved in a constitutional choice equilibrium involving many states.