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Voting procedure p-Disapproval voting is a generalization of standard Diss&Approval voting system (as presented by Alcantu and Laruell), build upon the grading which utilizes a parameter value p. As previously shown (see Hatzivelkos and Maretić, 2021), such generalization enables the fulfillment of the strong version of the Compromise axiom, as presented in (Hatzivelkos 2021). In this paper we are exploring the possibilities of axiomatic characterization of the p-Disapproval voting, following the method presented by Gonzalez, Laruelle and Solal (2019). With this in mind, we show that p-Disapproval vote satisfies standard Anonymity and Neutrality Axioms. Following the work of Gonzalez et al. we define the Independence of unconcerned voters and Independence of Pareto dominated candidates axioms and show that p-Disapproval vote satisfies both of them. As a result, p-Disapproval vote belongs to the class of voting functions described by Gonzales et. al. Furthermore, we introduce the notion of voting rule characterization dilemma, and explore the possibilities of construction a characterization dilemma for p-Disapproval vote.

Proof of liabilities (PoL) allows a prover to prove his/her liabilities to a group of verifiers. This is a cryptographic primitive once used only for proving financial solvency but is also applicable to domains outside finance, including transparent and private donations, new algorithms for disapproval voting and publicly verifiable official reports such as COVID-19 daily cases. These applications share a common nature in incentives: it's not in the prover's interest to increase his/her total liabilities. We generalize PoL for these applications by attempting for the first time to standardize the goals it should achieve from security, privacy and efficiency perspectives. We also propose DAPOL+, a concrete PoL scheme extending the state-of-the-art DAPOL protocol but providing provable security and privacy, with benchmark results demonstrating its practicality. In addition, we explore techniques to provide additional features that might be desired in different applications of PoL and measure the asymptotic probability of failure.

We exploit seating rules in the European Parliament to identify peer effects in legislative voting. Sitting adjacently leads to a 7 percent reduction in the overall likelihood that two members of the European Parliament (MEPs) from the same party differ in their vote. Peer effects are markedly stronger among pairs of women, MEP pairs from the same country, and in close votes. Using variation in seating across the parliament's two venues (Brussels and Strasbourg), we show that peer effects are persistent: MEPs who have sat together in the past disagree less even when they are not seated adjacently. (JEL D72, Z13)

Do people acquire more information when they are encouraged to participate in elections? This paper presents empirical evidence on the effects of compulsory voting laws on the consumption of TV news. In Brazil, literate citizens over the age of eighteen are subject to a number of legal penalties if they fail to turn out on election day. This allows us to identify the causal effect of being under a compulsory voting regime on information acquisition. We find that compulsory voting has a significant and substantial positive impact on the probability of an individual to watch Brazil's main TV newscast. Additionally, the effect is stronger for individuals with neutral evaluations of the incumbent president. Our regression discontinuity results are restricted to young voters who just turned eighteen and are robust to different polynomials and bandwidth lengths.

We test whether politicians can use direct contact to reconnect with citizens, increase turnout, and win votes. During the 2014 Italian municipal elections, we randomly assigned 26,000 voters to receive visits from city council candidates, canvassers supporting the candidates' list, or to a control group. While canvassers' visits increased turnout by 1.8 percentage points, candidates' had no impact on participation. Candidates increased their own vote share in the precincts they canvassed, but only at the expense of other candidates on the list. This suggests that their failure to mobilize non‐voters resulted from focusing on securing the preferences of active voters.

Which decision rule should we use to make a binary collective choice? While voting procedures are applied ubiquitously, they are criticized for being inefficient. Using monetary transfers, efficient choices can be made at the cost of a budget imbalance. Is it optimal to do so? And why are monetary transfers used only rarely in public decision making? We solve for the welfare maximizing social choice function taking monetary transfers explicitly into account. Under a mild regularity assumption on the distribution of types, we show that the optimal anonymous social choice function is implementable through qualified majority voting. Our result shows that using a VCG mechanism is not superior to voting in general and justifies the use of voting mechanisms. It thereby could explain why many decision rules employed in practice do not rely on monetary transfers.

In an economic theory of voting, voters have positive or negative costs of voting in favor of a proposal and positive or negative benefits from an accepted proposal. When votes have equal weight then simultaneous voting mostly has a unique pure strategy Nash equilibrium which is independent of benefits. Voting with respect to (arbitrarily small) costs alone, however, often results in voting against the “true majority” (Groseclose and Milyo, 2010). If voting is sequential as in the roll call votes of the US Senate then, in the unique subgame perfect equilibrium, the ”true majority” prevails (Groseclose and Milyo, 2013). It is shown that the result for sequential voting holds also with different weights of voters (shareholders), with multiple necessary majorities (EU decision making), or even more general rules. Simultaneous voting in the general model has more differentiated results.

Past research has showed the strong influence of social norms and conformity on voting choices in the national elections of many countries, with some more affected than others. This research demonstrates that social conformity has strongly and increasingly affected parliamentary elections in Russia. The analysis tests and estimates a mathematical model of the collective effect of conformity on people’s voting choices in each parliamentary election from 1993 to 2016 at the regional level using cross-sectional regression analysis. The analysis shows that voting and the party system are approaching the typical voting patterns seen in many democracies. Remarkably, voters typically are not aware of the influence of conformity on their own voting decisions.

This paper analyses the distribution of a priori voting power of states and regional groups within the UN Security Council, under the most salient reform proposals of the past decade. The results obtained show that moderate proposals, which do not seek to expand veto rights, generally yield a higher voting power share for non-veto states in the Council (both individually and collectively), at the expense of veto states, but they do not alter the geographical distribution of voting power significantly. By contrast, the more radical proposals, which seek to expand veto rights, yield a more balanced regional representation, but have the adverse effect of concentrating voting power almost entirely in the hands of the small number of states with veto rights, with non-veto states holding cumulatively less than 2 per cent of all voting power shares in the Security Council under the Normalized Banzhaf index and less than 0.01 per cent under the Shapley-Shubik index.

A basic problem in voting theory is that all the strategy profiles in which nobody is pivotal are Nash equilibria. We study elections where voters decide simultaneously on several binary issues. We extend the concept of conditional sincerity introduced by Alesina and Rosenthal (Econometrica 64(6):1311–1341, 1996) and propose an intuitive and simple criterion to refine equilibria in which players are not pivotal. This is shown to have a foundation in a refinement of perfection that takes into account the material voting procedure. We prove that in large elections the proposed solution is characterized through a weaker definition of Condorcet winner and always survives sophisticated voting.

In French parliamentary and local elections, candidates ranked first and second in the first round automatically qualify for the second round, while a third candidate qualifies only when selected by more than 12.5 percent of registered citizens. Using a fuzzy RDD around this threshold, we find that the third candidate's presence substantially increases the share of registered citizens who vote for any candidate and reduces the vote share of the top two candidates. It disproportionately harms the candidate ideologically closest to the third and causes her defeat in one fifth of the races. Additional evidence suggests that these results are driven by voters who value voting expressively over voting strategically for the top‐two candidate they dislike the least to ensure her victory; and by third candidates who, absent party‐level agreements leading to their dropping out, value the benefits associated with competing in the second round more than influencing its outcome.

The rational choice model of voting has been criticized for the fact that citizens expecting greater costs than the benefits associated with voting still turn out. This article focuses on the function of partisanship by which the effect of the rational calculation on voting is moderated. Previous studies have only tested the effect of partisanship on turnout additively failing to explore its interactions with the costs and benefits of voting. My multilevel analyses using the CSES data show that partisanship significantly moderates the effects of the information costs and intrinsic benefits of voting on turnout. These results, however, are not found in the postcommunist new democracies with unstable party systems hindering partisanship from serving as a political cue and from providing an expressive satisfaction of voting.

Economic voting is one of the most important mechanisms on explaining voting behavior and on establishing the democratic accountability. However, people tend to use perceived national economic condition on evaluating the incumbent, which is known as sociotropic voting, instead of their pocketbook. Previous studies suggest both altruism and self-interested future expectation may help explain this seemingly irrational behavior, but empirical works have not yet found convincing evidence to prove or disprove the self-interested motivation. This article suggests that patience makes people discount less on the potential future influence of the current national economic change; if self-interest drives sociotropic voting, patient voters would be more sociotropic. Consistent with the hypothesis, individual-level data from 2014 Comparative Congressional Election Survey shows that patient voters rely more on the perceived national economic change to evaluate the incumbent and make vote choice. Limited evidence of the linkage between impatience and pocketbook voting among non-partisans, and on the country-level is also provided.

Voting is a fundamental human right. Yet, individuals that are younger than 18 do typically not have this right since they are considered uninformed. However, recent evidence tentatively suggests that the political knowledge of youths is endogenous to the voting age. I test for the existence of such dynamic adjustments utilizing voting age discontinuities caused by Swedish laws. I employ a regression discontinuity strategy on Swedish register data to estimate the causal effect of early age voting right on political knowledge around age 18. The results do not support the existence of positive causal effects of early age voting right on political knowledge. Thus, we should not expect that 16-year-olds respond by acquiring more political knowledge if they are given the right to vote. This finding weakens the case for a lowering of the voting age from 18 to 16.

Do citizens hold congressional candidates accountable for their policy positions? Recent studies reach different conclusions on this important question. In line with the predictions of spatial voting theory, a number of recent survey-based studies have found reassuring evidence that voters choose the candidate with the most spatially proximate policy positions. In contrast, most electoral studies find that candidates’ ideological moderation has only a small association with vote margins, especially in the modern, polarized Congress. We bring clarity to these discordant findings using the largest dataset to date of voting behavior in congressional elections. We find that the ideological positions of congressional candidates have only a small association with citizens’ voting behavior. Instead, citizens cast their votes “as if” based on proximity to parties rather than individual candidates. The modest degree of candidate-centered spatial voting in recent Congressional elections may help explain the polarization and lack of responsiveness in the contemporary Congress.

Corporate scholars have long championed the use of mandatory cumulative voting in developing countries. Yet, in comparison to majority or plurality voting, we know very little about its effectiveness. Even though cumulative voting is allowed in most jurisdictions, in practice it is not widely used. Taiwan stands out as a unique jurisdiction which mandates cumulative voting on all companies. Therefore, Taiwan is the only jurisdiction, to the best of our knowledge, that can be used to test the causal effect of cumulative voting on director election. Taking advantage of an exogenous legal change that occurred in Taiwanese corporate law in December 2011, we use panel data on 640 publicly traded companies from 2009 to 2015 in a difference-in-differences framework to tease out the effect of cumulative voting. From 2001 to 2011, cumulative voting was the default rule, and 20 companies opted for majority voting. While directors and supervisors are elected every three years, not all companies change boards in the same year. Fixed-effect panel regression models show that in the 2012 election—about six months after the legal reform—the cumulative voting rule appears to have weakened the controlling shareholders’ control of the companies that had previously opted for majority voting. The controlling shareholders’ control in the 2013, 2014, and 2015 elections, however, did not decrease. The take-away lesson is that mandating cumulative voting may not create a long-term effect because controlling shareholders find other means to maintain influence. Policymakers should leave the governance decisions to the firm and focus on rules that could restrain private benefits of control and enhance transparency to rein in controlling shareholders.

To paint a fuller picture of economic voters, we combine personal income records with a representative election survey. We examine three central topics in the economic voting literature: pocketbook versus sociotropic voting, the effects of partisanship on economic evaluations, and voter myopia. First, we show that voters who appear in survey data to be voting based on the national economy are, in fact, voting equally on the basis of their personal financial conditions. Second, there is strong evidence of both partisan bias and economic information in economic evaluations, but personal economic data is required to separate the two. Third, although in experiments and aggregate historical data recent economic conditions appear to drive vote choice, we find no evidence of myopia when we examine actual personal economic data.

Pre-electoral surveys typically attempt, and sometimes fail, to predict voting behavior on the basis of explicit measures of agreement or disagreement with a candidate or political position. Here, we assessed whether a specific brain signature of disagreement with one's social values, the event-related potential component N400, could be predictive of voting behavior. We examined this possibility in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom. In the five weeks preceding the referendum, we recorded the N400 while participants with different vote intentions expressed their agreement or disagreement with pro- and against-EU statements. We showed that the N400 responded to statements incongruent with one's view regarding the EU. Crucially, this effect predicted actual voting behavior in decided as well as undecided voters. The N400 was a better predictor of voting choice than an explicit index of preference based on the behavioral responses. Our findings demonstrate that well-defined patterns of brain activity can forecast future voting behavior.

The competing theories of proximity and directional voting have long been used to model voting behavior. Empirically evaluating these theories, however, requires knowledge of voters’ utilities, which are inherently unobserved. Empiricists have generally dealt with this by using self-reports of utility. Yet, self-reports are likely biased, leaving experimental predictions at odds with real-world election outcomes. We improve upon this method by constructing a discrete choice model which is able to measure the likelihood of any one voter exhibiting proximity voting behavior as opposed to directional voting behavior, without needing to know voters’ utilities. We subsequently conduct a voting experiment with over 1,800 participants to estimate the parameters of the model. Our results suggest that, among voters whose expected behavior differs across the two theories, there is an approximately even split between voting behaviors, and the probability of exhibiting proximity voting behavior decreases by roughly 10 percentage points for each step away from the midpoint of a (−10 to +10) political spectrum. Our results are robust across two measures of preferences and four candidate pairings. The outcomes of our experiment are also consistent with the results of the 2012 Presidential Election, which took place the day after our experiment closed.

To date, most of our knowledge regarding individuals' propensity to internet vote comes from cross-sectional survey data. In this paper we try to break new ground by tracking individuals' actual behaviour over time. Specifically, we analyze citizens' choice of voting channel by exploiting a unique longitudinal dataset – the Canton of Geneva's vote registry database. Our aim is to explore patterns in the propensity to use internet voting among eligible voters. To this end, we first mine the registry data to identify a subset of voters that have experimented with internet voting. In a second stage, we explore the effects of key socio–demographic variables on individual voters' fidelity to internet voting. Our results are counter–intuitive. While the conventional wisdom is that younger voters are most likely to be mobilised to use the internet voting channel, we show that this is not the case in one of the few political systems where internet voting is readily available. Indeed, our evidence suggests that it is the older voters rather than ‘digital natives' (i.e., the younger voters) that are most likely to remain faithful to internet voting once they have experimented with it.

We build a model of voluntary and costly expressive voting, where the relative weight of ideology and valence issues over voting costs determines how people vote and if they actually turn out to vote. In line with the conventional rational calculus approach, the model predicts that the cost of voting depresses voter turnout. Against the conventional wisdom, though, high voting cost/low turnout elections tend to have a larger share of voters for whom the common value signal on candidates’ valence matches their private value views, thus raising the chances that high valence candidates are elected.

Does voting behaviour in the Council of Ministers reflect different national interests? In this article, we explore this question by studying requests for authorization of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The fact that GMOs constitute a highly contentious issue in the European Union enables us to look underneath the ‘culture of consensus’ which usually characterizes voting behaviour in the Council. We argue that the focus on one issue area can help us to discover more specific voting patterns than those that have previously been found in EU legislative studies. Indeed, based on a dataset comprising all authorization requests voted on in the Council between 2004 and 2014, we find that ministers' voting behaviour is significantly influenced by important national factors such as public opinion, party politics, and structural as well as sectoral interests.

The hopes that e-voting would increase voter turnout have not really materialized; any turnout increases in those countries where Internet voting has been introduced have been negligible. But the effect of one mechanism by which this mode of voting might influence turnout is still largely unknown, namely its potential to keep voters voting at higher rates than paper voting, and thus if not reversing, then at least putting a halt to further decline in turnout. This article examines the degree to which people who vote on the Internet once carry on doing so, thereby testing the hypothesis that e-voting is more habit forming than paper voting. We test if e-voting displays traits typical of a habit, that is, being a self-reinforced behavior detached from its original motivations. Survey data are analyzed from five consecutive and e-enabled nationwide elections in Estonia between 2009 and 2015. The results suggest e-voting to be very “sticky”; a first time e-voter is very likely to stay e-voting in subsequent elections at consistently higher rates than a typical paper voter is to stay paper voting, or a nonvoter to remain a nonvoter. The results call for a re-examination of the association between Internet voting and turnout.

The article proposes a view of voting as symbolic selection that enables commensuration among otherwise balkanized electoral theories, focusing on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. When voters select candidates, it argues, what they are doing is selecting a signifier for a coalition of symbols that the candidate has come to signify to the voter over the course of the campaign. This perspective is used to better understand why Trump won by focusing on how different aspects of the campaign redounded to the assemblage and formation of the coalitions of symbols that voters would be voting on when they were voting. The paper argues that these coalitions help explain Trump’s narrow victories in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania that were so decisive in the 2016 election.

The paper studies the risk that all members of a set of voters give their votes unanimously and thereby breach the privacy of the voting procedure. This problem becomes relevant in the situation that the voting behavior of a small (sub)set of voters can be identified by the way they transmit their votes, e. g., when at least two possible ways to give votes (like voting with ballot boxes, postal voting, and electronic voting) are admitted in theory but one of them is used by only a small minority of voters in practice. For the situation of a simple alternative between “yes” and “no” it turns out that as long as the probability of approval lies between 25% and 75% the probability of a breach of vote privacy by unanimous voting is smaller than 1% if there are at least 17 voters and even smaller than 0.1% if there are at least 25 voters. If, however, the rate of approval or disapproval increases, even to values already observed in reality, then the probability of such a breach of vote privacy can no longer be neglected. And even small values for the probability of a breach of vote privacy sum up when several thousands of these situations appear in parallel. Furthermore, if there is a three valued situation “yes” – “no” – “abstention” present, then, depending on the concept of vote privacy, a breach of it becomes considerably more probable even if the probability of approval remains within the boundaries mentioned above.

While scholars have shed light on our understanding of elections in less and non-democratic countries, the incentives behind electoral participation in these countries remain unexplored. This paper...

In many international institutions, contested norms pass via voting. Although votes express national positions, dynamic vote shifts are a widespread phenomenon. Why do states sometimes change their voting stances concerning re-occurring international rules and norms? To explain observed variation, this analysis theorises the role of domestic and external windows of opportunity as well as the role of lobbying in the United Nations General Assembly. It shows that changes in government composition and changes in the text of re-occurring international rules and norms matter. Yet, whilst resourceful actors more likely change their voting stance after having successfully negotiated text changes, less powerful states are more likely to shift voting stances in response to third party lobbying.

This paper studies empirically the voting outcomes for the first post-revolution presidential elections in Egypt. In the light of strong success of the Islamist candidate, Mohamed Morsi, I identify three dimensions which can affect voting outcomes: human capital stock, wealth and employment structure. I find that less educated, poorer and more unequal districts support more Islamists. I also find an effect of the employment structure of a district on voting. I test the results by comparing the determinants of voting outcomes of the presidential elections to those of the 2011 and 2012 constitutional referendums.

Research on turnout in presidential elections has shown that “battleground” state status has modest effects on turnout, raising the question of why individuals vote even in noncompetitive states. We present experimental evidence showing that the typically small effect of battleground status on turnout may be tied to the fact that voting norms are insensitive to whether a given individual’s vote is likely to affect the outcome of an election. Instead, variability in the social rewards to voting are more closely tied to the behaviors of others.

Models of multilateral bargaining predict that agents would vote solely based on the share they are offered and that their vote is determined by whether that share is at least as high as the continuation value (CV) of the game. The standard experiment investigating behavior in multilateral bargaining is not well designed to determine if that is the case. Our experiment makes three changes to the typical design: it introduces substantial variation in the CV (using a within-subjects design and varying the discount factor), it generates variability in offers using computer-generated offers while retaining the equilibrium of the original game, and it uses belief elicitation. These changes allow us to consider whether behavioral voting rules that are independent of the CV or factors besides one’s own share are important to voting decisions. We find that the main determinant of votes is the share one is offered, but that when offers are believed to come from another participant, a proposal is less likely to be approved if the proposer tries to take a lot for himself. Nonetheless, the equilibrium voting rule, which is based on the CV of the game organizes choices better than behavioral rules that are independent of the CV.

This article related to the use of signs and symbols as a protest vote beyond the invalid votes of the presidential election 2014 in Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta (DIY). This paper will interpret the hidden messages conveyed by voters through a ballot. This article contributes to solve two problems at once, the conceptual and practical. Conceptually, there is a gap in the study of protest voting. Protest voting describes that voting as not only used to support candidates or parties but can be used as a form of protest. However, in this paper the protest was not conveyed through voting but using signs, symbols, or messages in ballot. Practically, there are problems in the electoral system on viewing people votes. The current electoral system generalizes the approach on viewing invalid votes. Whereas, there some hidden messages of people votes and the essence of the election itself beyond the invalid ballot papers. This paper shows that these messages can not be accommodated by the current electoral system. Those include an indication of post-election money politics, expressions of blissful voters delivered on the ballot, the expletives and insults expressed by voters, a rejection of the candidates, and also a rejection for the current electoral system.

Objetivos: identificar las características del Voto Obligatorio y su aplicabilidad en el sistema democrático de Colombia. Metodología: investigación cualitativa y documental; las fuentes documentales fueron las leyes, decretos e investigaciones sobre la elección popular, la Democracia, el Voto y el Voto Obligatorio en Colombia. De igual modo, se tuvieron en cuenta estadísticas y muestreos publicados por el Congreso de la Republica, periódicos nacionales y de centros de estudios políticos internacionales. Resultado: se encontró que en Colombia el Voto Obligatorio no ha tenido mayor relevancia, debido a que su difusión y puesta en práctica no cuenta con las bases teóricas y jurídicas requeridas para ser aprobado por el Congreso de la Republica; esto, sumado a la creciente ola de desconfianza en el sistema electoral del país. Conclusiones: se concluye que el Voto Obligatorio tiene ventajas para la Democracia y que su establecimiento implica contravenciones para quienes no cumplan el deber de votar.

In this article we analyze the conditioning effect of party nationalization, and in particular dynamic nationalization, on economic voting. While previous single-country and cross-national studies suggest a weak correlation between economic conditions and voting patterns, we argue that this relationship is conditioned by the degree to which parties are dynamically nationalized. Using both case study and large-n analysis, we show first that retrospective voting can be more nationalized than prospective voting. We then argue that national economic conditions cannot and do not relate to voting patterns, at least when weak dynamic nationalization is weak. The findings also call into question the well-known thesis about the clarity of responsibility as a conditional factor in explaining retrospective (economic) voting. There is imperfect correspondence between “clarity of responsibility” and dynamic party nationalization, but retrospective voting presumes that voters across the country respond in kind. This explains why the only evidence we find of a correlation of national economic indicators and voting is when there is high dynamic nationalization.

Rates of invalid voting in Latin America are among the highest in the world. Yet, scholars have not reached an agreement about whether these votes are driven by voter protest and, if so, what voters are protesting. Understanding whether these high invalid vote rates signify anti-democratic tendencies is particularly relevant given recent recessions in democratic quality across the region. This paper presents a theoretical framework and empirical tests using individual level data from 14 Latin American countries to show that invalid voting in presidential contests is used by individuals, particularly those high in knowledge, to protest poor government performance. However, invalid voting is not, on balance, an anti-system behavior. While political alienation differentially predicts invalid voting in countries with mandatory vote laws, the link between performance assessments and self-reported invalid voting is consistent across various contextual features that scholars link to invalid voting behavior.

When committees make decisions, voting rules are coupled with one of three disclosure rules: open voting, in which each committee member's individual vote is revealed; anonymous voting, in which only an anonymized tally is publicized; and secret voting, in which only the outcome is disclosed. I focus on strategic voters who have a preference for strategic ambiguity, and show that the amount of disclosure may have a non-monotonic effect on both the accuracy of the decision and the welfare of the voters. In particular, anonymous voting can yield both lower accuracy and higher welfare than both open and secret voting.

A jury of experts is often convened to decide between two states of Nature relevant to a managerial decision. For example, a legal jury decides between “innocent” and “guilty”, while an economic jury decides between “high” and “low” growth when there is an investment decision. Usually the jurors vary in their abilities to determine the actual state. When the jurors make their collective decision by sequential majority voting, the order of voting in terms of juror ability can affect the optimal probability Q of reaching a correct verdict. We show that when the jury has size three, Q is maximized if the juror of median ability votes first. When voting in this order, sequential voting can close more than 50% of the gap (in terms of Q ) between simultaneous voting and the verdict that would be reached without voting if the jurors’ private information were made public. Our results have implications for larger juries, where we answer an age-old question by showing that voting by seniority (decreasing ability order) is significantly better than by anti-seniority (increasing ability order). To obtain our new results we introduce a richer notion of private information. Instead of the binary information assumed since Condorcet (for “innocent” or “guilty”), we give each juror a number in interval [ − 1 , + 1 ] with larger values indicating stronger signals for “innocent”.

What do voters really receive when they vote? This paper exploits 25 years of municipal level voting data in Massachusetts to identify the specific effects of voter approved ballots. In particular, this analysis attempts to determine the degree to which the median voter preferences are reflected in public expenditures. The findings suggest that voters see little change in expenditures, regardless of voting outcomes. To my knowledge, this paper is the first of its kind to directly link voting outcomes with non capital expenditure outcomes. This has important implications for discussing frictions that arise between voter preferences and local public expenditures.

This article examines whether the voting age should be lowered to 16. The dominant view in the literature is that 16-year-olds in the United Kingdom are not politically mature enough to vote since they lack political knowledge, political interest and stable political preferences (Chan and Clayton, 2006). I reject this conclusion and instead argue that the voting age should be lowered to 16. First, I look at Chan and Clayton’s empirical claims and show that these features of 16- and 17-year-olds are in fact created by exclusionary social practices and therefore that these features cannot be used to justify their exclusion from the vote. Second, I evaluate preliminary evidence from Austria which suggests that 16- and 17-year-olds, when actually given the vote, are politically mature. Third, I show that, on a balance of harms, considering that some 16- and 17-year-olds are mature, we still should lower the voting age even if some 16- and 17-year-olds are not politically mature. I conclude that the voting age should be lowered to (at least) 16.

Conventional political wisdom holds that policies that make voting easier will increase turnout and ultimately benefit Democratic candidates. We challenge this assumption, questioning the ability of party strategists to predict which changes to election law will advantage them. Drawing on previous research, we theorize that voting laws affect who votes in diverse ways depending on the specific ways that they reduce the costs of participating. We assemble datasets of county-level vote returns in the 2004, 2008, and 2012 presidential elections and model these outcomes as a function of early voting and registration laws, using both cross-sectional regression and difference-in-difference models. Unlike Election Day registration, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the results show that early voting generally helps Republicans. We conclude with implications for partisan manipulation of election laws.

In this paper, I study gender-based voting behavior in the Belgian proportional electoral system. In particular, I investigate two possible causes for why voters experience the need to simplify their voting decision by using a gender-cue. First, in line with the findings of previous studies, I find that voters with lower levels of political sophistication who are less able to collect and process political information, are consequently more likely to use the sex of a candidate as a shortcut. However, the effect of political sophistication on gender- based voting behavior is limited. Second, based on the literature, I expect that the low information context of the second-order European elections would cause both high and low information voters to become more reliant on gender-cues to simplify their voting decision and by extent would cause the effect of political sophistication on gender-based voting to diminish. Against theoretical expectations, I find that the effect of the electoral context is negligible.

In a developing democracy, can elections change the behavior of participating citizens? I study the effect of voting in South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994 on future voting and present evidence of the lasting behavioral effects of past participation. Eligibility to participate in 1994 affects future voting by 3 percentage points, with an average treatment effect of actually voting between 3.5 and 8.5 percentage points. Given low turnout rates, these effects account for 7%–20% of the size of the electorate. To explain this result, I propose a theoretical explanation that draws on psychological research—affective experience habituation. I argue that persistence (or habituation) in voting behavior is at least partly driven by the creation of associations between first-time voting and positive emotional states. This theory is tested within the context of the 1994 election by exploiting variation in electoral experiences.

Mandatory voting has received public and scholarly interest as a solution for problems of unequal representation and policies that advantage the wealthy. Yet some oppose mandatory voting because it seems to coerce political expression, in violation of the human right to free expression. This article fundamentally reinterprets the point of mandatory voting as serving the self-identified purposes of citizens and so minimizes concerns about coercion. It uses survey evidence to show that mandatory voting can help the large majority of American citizens who believe they should vote to do so, thereby functioning as a precommitment mechanism. For the minority who do not think they should vote, mandatory voting functions as a nudge to surveillance, which helps citizens protect their interests, whatever they may be, through encouraging surveillance of political actors. The argument concludes that mandatory voting would make all citizens better off by their own lights and without troubling coercion.

This paper explores ethical issues raised by quadratic voting. We compare quadratic voting to majority voting from two ethical perspectives: the perspective of utilitarianism and that of democratic theory. From a utilitarian standpoint, the comparison is ambiguous: if voter preferences are independent of wealth, then quadratic voting outperforms majority voting, but if voter preferences are polarized by wealth, then majority voting may be superior. From the standpoint of democratic theory, we argue that assessments in terms of efficiency are too narrow. Voting institutions and political institutions more generally face a legitimacy requirement. We argue that in the presence of inequalities of wealth, any vote buying mechanism, including quadratic voting, will have a difficult time meeting this requirement.

Voting trust arrangements have a long history at both the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Surface Transportation Board as devices to protect the incentives of acquiring firms and maintain the independence of acquiring and target firms during the pendency of regulatory investigation of the merger proposal. However, they are not without problems. The STB argued in 2001 that as Class I railroads have become fewer and larger, it may be difficult to find alternative purchasers for the target firm if the STB turns down the proposal. The Antitrust Division argued in 2016 that joint stock ownership creates anticompetitive and/or otherwise undesirable incentives, even if the independence of the voting trustee is complete. On the other hand, the functions served by voting trusts in railroad mergers are served by merger termination fees and other contractual “lockup” mechanisms in other parts of the economy, without the same incentive problems as voting trusts. Thus voting trusts may no longer serve a useful function in railroad merger deliberations.

We consider the quadratic voting mechanism (Lalley and Weyl in Quadratic voting. Working paper, University of Chicago, 2015; Weyl in The robustness of quadratic voting. Working paper, University of Chicago, 2015) and focus on the incentives it provides individuals deciding what proposals or candidates to put up for a vote. The incentive compatibility of quadratic voting rests upon the assumption that individuals value the money used to buy votes, while the budget balance/efficiency of the mechanism requires that the money spent by one voter by redistributed among the other voters. From these assumptions, we show that it follows that strategic proposers will have an incentive to offer proposals with greater uncertainty about individual values. Similarly, we show that, in an electoral setting, quadratic voting provides an incentive to propose candidates with polarized, non-convergent platforms.

This study investigates the effects of welfare reform in the United States in the 1990s on voting among low-income women. Using the November Current Population Surveys with the added Voting and Registration Supplement for the years 1990 through 2004 and exploiting changes in welfare policy across states and over time, we estimate the causal effects of welfare reform on women's voting registration and voting participation during the period in which welfare reform unfolded. During this time period, voter turnout was decreasing in the United States. We find robust evidence that welfare reform led to smaller declines in voting (about 3 to 4 percentage points, which translates to about 10% relative to the baseline mean) for women who were exposed to welfare reform compared to several different comparison groups of similar women who were much less exposed. The robust findings suggest that welfare reform had prosocial effects on civic participation, as characterized by voting. The effects were largely confined to presidential elections, were stronger in Democratic than Republican states, were stronger in states with stronger work incentive policies, and appeared to operate through employment, education, and income. (JEL D72, H53, I38, J21)

Objective We investigate the phenomenon of municipal-level strategic voting in a high-profile mayoral election with a nonpartisan ballot. The rate of strategic voting is calculated, and we investigate whether different types of anti-candidate attitudes (based on policy or personality) affect strategic behavior. Methods We use survey data from the 2014 Toronto Election Study. Results The estimated rate of strategic voting was 1.3 percent. Among those who did cast a strategic ballot, we find that anti-candidate attitudes did not affect the likelihood of voting strategically—until the source of the dislike is considered, at which point electors who dislike a candidate on the basis of personality are shown to be more likely to cast their ballots strategically. Conclusions Strategic voting was minimal, and did not affect the election outcome. The type of dislike toward a candidate (either on the basis of policy or personality) affects strategic behavior.