Costly voting when both information and preferences differ: is turnout too high or too low?

Abstract

We study a model of costly voting over two alternatives, where agents' preferences are determined by both (i) a private preference in favour of one alternative e.g. candidates' policies, and (ii) heterogeneous information in the form of noisy signals about a commonly valued state of the world e.g. candidate competence. We show that depending on the level of the personal bias (weight on private preference), voting is either according to private preferences or according to signals. When voting takes place according to private preferences, there is a unique equilibrium with ine¢ciently high turnout. In contrast, when voting takes place according to signals, turnout is locally too low. Multiple Pareto-ranked voting equilibria may exist and in particular, compulsory voting may Pareto dominate voluntary voting. Moreover, an increase in personal bias can cause turnout to rise or fall, and an increase in the accuracy of information may cause a switch to voting on the basis of signals and thus lower turnout, even though it increases welfare.

Turnout, Political Preferences and Information: Experimental Evidence from Perú

“…29 Summarizing, the descriptive data shown above supports the basic hypothesis that a reduction in the fines for not voting leads to lower turnout. The next section outlines a more formal framework to test the predictions of the model presented in Section 2.…”

“…At the same time, this learning is independent of the size of the village. 29 I have run all the tables below including the extreme poor, and they are available upon request. All of the patterns and main qualitative results remain unchanged.…”

Does forced voting result in political polarization?

“…Our estimates show how political preferences change in the transition from a voluntary to a compulsory voting system. We provide strong statistical evidence for these effects, thus contributing to the open debate among academics and the public regarding the consequences of a forced democracy (Krasa and Polborn 2009;Krishna and Morgan 2011;Borgers 2004;Ghosal and Lockwood 2009). More generally, our findings add to the understanding of the effects of voting participation on political preferences.…”

Costly voting, turnout, and candidate valence

“…In particular, within a framework where voters have private values and commonly shared values and vote in an instrumental way, Ghosal and Lockwood (2009) prove that a switch from private to common value voting might lead both to lower turnout and to better selection of agents, and Aldashev (2015) shows that lower turnout due to higher ideological mobility of voters actually reduces equilibrium rents by self-interested politicians.…”