Is there really a turnout paradox?

Abstract

This paper challenges the notion that voting games with purely instrumental players cannot account for high turnout (the ‘turnout paradox’). Although it has been known for over 25 years that such games can generate high-turnout equilibria, the said equilibria have been rejected on the grounds that they are fragile. This paper shows that this claim is incorrect because it is based on a computation of pivot probabilities that is not consistent with equilibrium analysis. Once the relevant computations are corrected, it becomes possible to obtain upper bounds on the cost of voting compatible with high-turnout equilibria showing that these equilibria are indeed quite robust. This paper concludes by extending the model to include continuous outcome functions, showing that while they preserve the high-turnout equilibria obtained before, they allow for better characterizations of the results

What Motivates People to Vote? The Role of Selfishness, Duty, and Social Motives When Voting

“…P i is small, especially in models where it is assumed exogenous. When assumed endogenous, the high-turnout pure equilibria are generally not robust or result only under demanding assumptions (e.g., (Medina, 2011;Palfrey & Rosenthal, 1983, 1985. Both the B and D terms were examined in further detail by the turnout literature that came later.…”

“…2. There have also been studies that sought to derive large turnout equilibria by keeping the parsimony of the original rational choice models but introducing new elements, such as margins of victory (Castanheira, 2003), endogenous probabilities of being pivotal (Medina, 2011), and individual-level random shocks (Levine & Palfrey, 2007). However, in these accounts, only selfish/instrumental motives are assumed.…”