Expressive Voting and Its Cost: Evidence From Runoffs With Two or Three Candidates

Abstract

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.

Collective Emotions and Protest Vote

“…The second explanation assumes "warm glow" in protest voting. It is in line with the empirical evidence offered by Pons and Tricaud (2018). They show that in French first-past-thepost elections the presence of the third candidate decreases the share of the top two candidates in proportion to their ideological proximity to the third one.…”

“…Second, there can be "warm glow" in protest voting. Individuals may enjoy the act of casting a protest vote per se, in line with the empirical pattern recently studied by Pons and Tricaud (2018). We show how the two explanations actually interact: aggrievement may lead to more warm glow in protest voting, and the latter in turn might reduce the incentive to vote for a traditional party among those who vote strategically, thus reinforcing the protest outcome.…”

Identifying the Effect of Election Closeness on Voter Turnout: Evidence from Swiss Referenda

“…Existing work has tested rational choice models of voter turnout structurally (e.g., Coate andConlin, 2004 andCoate et al, 2008) and in the lab (e.g., Levine and Palfrey, 2007, Duffy and Tavits, 2008, and Agranov et al, 2018, finding mixed results. It has also identified other drivers of voter turnout: expressive motives (Pons and Tricaud, 2018), personality traits (Ortoleva and Snowberg, 2015), habits (Fujiwara et al, 2016), social considerations (Gerber et al, 2016, Funk, 2010, and DellaVigna et al, 2016, political movements (Madestam et al, 2013), media content (Strömberg, 2004, Gentzkow, 2006, DellaVigna and Kaplan, 2007, Enikolopov et al, 2011, Gentzkow et al, 2011, and Spenkuch and Toniatti, 2018, the existence of exit poll results (Morton et al, 2015), and compulsory voting laws (León, 2017 andHoffman et al, 2017). 6 Our evidence of a causal effect of anticipated election closeness complements this empirical literature and provides support for theoretical models in which voter turnout increases with beliefs about closeness.…”

The Impact of an Energy Efficiency Improvement Policy on the Economic Performance of Electricity-Intensive Firms in Ghana

“…Since this optimal data-driven bandwidth computation method was introduced by Calonico et al, [29,30] it has been adapted by several different studies that employed FRD. For instance, in the political economy field, Pons and Tricaud [31] adopted the method in the French election to study the voters' behavior by leveraging on the fact that 12.5% qualification threshold exists for the third candidate to be eligible in the second-round election. In the agricultural economy field, Aung et al [32] applied the method to the case of farmers in Myanmar whose eligibility to receive credit depends on whether their rice farming area is greater than 10 acres or not, to study a credit policy's impacts on rice production.…”