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In democracies, majority-rule voting is an esteemed rule for collective decisions, but its hazards have recently become apparent after a series of controversial referendums and ascendant populist leaders. Here, we investigate people's judgments about when voting is appropriate for collective decisions across five countries with diverse cultures and political institutions (Denmark, Hungary, India, Russia, and USA). Participants read scenarios in which individuals with conflicting preferences need to make a collective decision. They judged whether the group should decide by voting, consensus, leadership, or chance. We experimentally manipulated whether the group contains a vulnerable minority – a smaller number of people with more at stake than the majority. In all five countries, participants generally preferred voting without a vulnerable minority, with relatively greater support for voting in more democratic countries. But, when the group included a vulnerable minority, participants in all countries reduced their support for voting and instead preferred consensus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do perceptions of abuse in social insurance programs undercut program support? Answering this causal question is difficult because perceptions of program abuse can arise from multiple potential causes. Examining the case of disability insurance, we circumvent this challenges using laboratory experiments to study the interplay between program abuse and program support. Specifically, we test whether participants vote to reduce benefit levels when they observe program abuse, even if that abuse is not directly costly to them. We use a labor market shock to induce program abuse and show that the observation of a healthy worker receiving benefits causes workers who are unaffected by the shock to vote to lower benefits. This effect arises only when reducing benefit levels also reduces taxes. Our results demonstrate a causal link between program abuse and diminished support for social insurance, validating accounts that stress how violations of cooperative norms can undercut socially beneficial government programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]