Democracy and resilient pro-social behavioral change: an experimental study

Abstract

Both experimental and empirical studies have shown that democratically imposing a policy that encourages cooperation may increase its effectiveness by enhancing the voters' cooperation behavior. But, do those involved in the democratic decision-making process change their behavior when faced with an exogenously implemented rule? This paper experimentally shows that the voters that are involved in a successful democratic selection of a policy behave more pro-socially as consistent with recent studies. My experiment moreover shows that such a successful democratic imposition of the policy may increase the voters' level of cooperation even when the policy is undemocratically imposed.

Institutional Endogeneity and Third-Party Punishment in Social Dilemmas

“…The proportion of individuals in favor of having a nondeterrent third-party punishment institution is in line with previous comparable studies where subjects vote on the introduction of a punishment institution (see e.g. Tyran and Feld, 2006, Dal Bó et al, 2010, Markussen et al, 2014, Kamei, 2014. 15…”

“…This finding is evidence of an endogeneity premium. Kamei (2014) and Chen (2014) use the same mechanism in their experimental design and replicate this regularity. In Kamei (2014) subjects play two public good games simultaneously.…”

“…Markussen et al (2014) report that around 65% of subjects vote in favor of implementing costly non-deterrent centralized sanctions upon gaining experience in a social dilemma setting (around 20% of inexperienced subjects vote the same way). Kamei (2014) finds that 42% of subjects vote in favor of a costless non-deterrent informal sanctioning institution.…”

State or nature? Endogenous formal versus informal sanctions in the voluntary provision of public goods

“…First, the selection of an institution by voting may in and of itself influence its performance (Tyran and Feld, 2006, Dal Bó et al, 2010, Kamei, 2013, Sutter et al, 2010. This factor might also apply to informal sanctions.…”

“…Some 60% of groups offered the choice choose the mild law and achieve higher efficiency than either those in the exogenous or endogenous no law and in the exogenous mild law conditions. In an experiment on spillover effects of democracy, Kamei (2013) also lets subjects vote on the introduction of a mild sanction in a VCM, finding that pro-sanction subjects cooperated significantly more when the law was endogenously, rather than exogenously, imposed.…”