Imposing a turnout threshold in referendums

Hizen, Yoichi; Shinmyo, Masafumi

doi:10.1007/s11127-010-9670-1

Cited by 20 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Similarly, Hizen and Shinmyo (2011) find that participation quora create incentives for strategic abstention when the participation quorum is anything other than negligibly low. From a different perspective, that of a group turnout model, Herrera and Mattozzi (2010) argue that participation quora distort the incentives for parties and interest groups to mobilize the electorate.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

“…In other cases, the required threshold is applied to the number of votes cast in favor of the proposal (approval quora). In what concerns the regulation of referendums and initiatives, for example, quora have been adopted in many countries across the world (no less than 53, according to International IDEA's Direct Democracy dataset 4 ), including Japan (Hizen andShinmyo 2011), Colombia, Venezuela or Taiwan (International IDEA 2007), almost all of Germany for municipal and state referenda and initiatives (Kaufman, Büchi, and Braun 2007;Verhulst and Nijeboer 2007), and other seventeen European Union countries, either at the national (Aguiar-Conraria and Magalhães 2010a: 70) or the local levels (Schiller 2010: 28-30). …”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Experimental evidence that quorum rules discourage turnout and promote election boycotts

2015

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Many democratic decision making institutions involve quorum rules. Such rules are commonly motivated by concerns about the "legitimacy" or "representativeness" of decisions reached when only a subset of eligible voters participates. A prominent example of this can be found in the context of direct democracy mechanisms, such as referenda and initiatives. We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate the consequences of the two most common types of quorum rules: a participation quorum and an approval quorum. We find that both types of quora lead to lower participation rates, dramatically increasing the likelihood of full-fledged electoral boycotts on the part of those who endorse the Status Quo. This discouraging effect is significantly larger under a participation quorum than under an approval quorum.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 89%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Experimental evidence that quorum rules discourage turnout and promote election boycotts

2015

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“…Thus, under the plurality rule, all of the voters go to the polls, and the two candidates will be in a tie. In some models of referendums (e.g., Aguiar-Conraria and Magalhães [17]; Hizen and Shinmyo [18]), a fixed number of voters are randomly assigned one of two groups (i.e., voters who want to keep the status quo and voters who want to change the current situation). In Myerson's [19] Poisson game, the total number of voters is also a random variable.…”

Section: Voting Equilibriamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, at least type-c voters receive a positive payoff by voting for candidate 3 and so go to the polls. 18 As long as the three conditions are satisfied, some of the voters may vote in a different way. For example, a part of type-a (b, respectively) voters may vote for candidates 1 (2) and 4 randomly.…”

Section: Three-candidate Equilibriamentioning

confidence: 99%

Does a Least-Preferred Candidate Win a Seat? A Comparison of Three Electoral Systems

Hizen

2015

Economies

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In this paper, the differences between two variations of proportional representation (PR), open-list PR and closed-list PR, are analyzed in terms of their ability to accurately reflect voter preference. The single nontransferable vote (SNTV) is also included in the comparison as a benchmark. We construct a model of voting equilibria with a candidate who is least preferred by voters in the sense that replacing the least-preferred candidate in the set of winners with any loser is Pareto improving, and our focus is on whether the least-preferred candidate wins under each electoral system. We demonstrate that the least-preferred candidate never wins under the SNTV, but can win under open-list PR, although this is less likely than winning under closed-list PR.

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“…However, this statement is true only when voters behave non‐strategically. In fact, theoretical works that assume strategic voters in non‐cooperative games, such as Aguiar‐Conraria and Magalhães (2010a) and Hizen and Shinmyo (2011), show that imposing a quorum requirement can induce strategic abstention by voters who seek to invalidate the outcome, rather than going to the polls only to lose the referendum. Thus, such behaviors may distort the outcome in favor of the minority.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Referendum Experiment with Participation Quorums

Hizen¹

2020

Kyklos

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SummaryThis paper conducts a laboratory experiment focused on a yes/no referendum in which the outcome is valid only if voter turnout is greater than a predetermined level. Such a participation quorum is argued to induce the minority group of voters to abstain strategically in particular when the quorum is large. In our experiment, subjects are randomly divided into two groups yes and no in advance of voting, and the level of quorum changes round by round. We observe that (i) if the quorum is small, all subjects go to the polls, and (ii) if the quorum is large, subjects in the ex‐ante majority group go to the polls, whereas subjects in the ex‐ante minority group tend to abstain. As a result, if the quorum is large, it frequently happens that the outcome is rendered invalid because of low voter turnout. Furthermore, when the number of subjects in each referendum increases, subjects of the ex‐ante minority abstain more aggressively, and there arises room for the ex‐post minority to win if the expected number of members is similar between the two groups. Therefore, if policy makers would like to avoid the possibility of strategic abstention, then our results suggest that they should impose either no quorum or only a relatively small quorum which most voters expect will be dwarfed by the actual turnout. If policy makers also care about the possible determination of either yes or no with extremely low voter turnout, as well as strategic abstention, then a relatively small quorum is recommended.

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Imposing a turnout threshold in referendums

Abstract: Referendum, Turnout threshold, Participation quorum, Strategic abstention, Game theory,

Cited by 20 publications

References 8 publications

Experimental evidence that quorum rules discourage turnout and promote election boycotts

Experimental evidence that quorum rules discourage turnout and promote election boycotts

Does a Least-Preferred Candidate Win a Seat? A Comparison of Three Electoral Systems

A Referendum Experiment with Participation Quorums

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