Mandate and paternalism: A theory of large elections

Abstract

We propose a game theoretic costly voting model of large elections that incorporates the assumption that mandate matters. This innovation is motivated by empirical evidence that US Representatives with larger victory margins on average vote in a more partisan manner. If voters are paternalistic, this new model predicts strictly positive limiting turnout rates as the population grows arbitrarily large. The model also preserves stylized comparative statics results of costly voting models, including the underdog effect and the competition effect. Finally, we develop an innovative computational strategy to solve the model for large, finite, electorates and show that our results are not only qualitatively, but also quantitatively relevant.

A Comparative Welfare Analysis of Electoral Systems with Endogenous Turnout

“…Faravelli et al . () and Herrera et al . () have also established the underdog effect under different electoral systems.…”

“…Among these, Krishna and Morgan (, ), Faravelli and Sanchez‐Pages (), Faravelli et al . () and Herrera et al . () are particularly related to my study as they combine the analysis of electoral institutions with endogenous turnout.…”

“…Faravelli et al . () analyse turnout in a model with paternalistic citizens, in which the margin of victory for the winning party matters for the final outcome and payoffs. Their setting admits a variety of mechanisms which map the margin of victory to a final policy.…”

(Don’t) Make My Vote Count

“…When the electorate grows without bound, turnout converges to zero independently of the electoral rule (see Faravelli et al, 2013). Different ways to generate positive limiting turnout have been proposed, such as mobilization (Morton, 1991;Shachar andNalebuff, 1999), ethical voting (Coate andConlin, 2004;Feddersen and Sandroni, 2006), aggregate uncertainty on the popularity of the majoritatian alternative (Myatt, 2012) or other-regarding preferences (Evren, 2012;Faravelli et al, 2013). However, we chose to abstract away from this issue and focus on finite elections, in order to analyze the most basic driving forces of voting decisions without adding any potentially confounding factors.…”

Turnout Across Democracies

“…We assume "collectivism," so the planner on each side, A and B, only looks at the total cost of voting of the voters on his side. The results would not change if we assumed "altruism," as inFeddersen and Sandroni (2006): Each planner takes into account the cost of voting of all citizens who vote regardless of their side.13 The DGRHR is also a key regularity condition in strategic models of turnout such asFaravelli, Man, and Walsh (2013). Che, Dessein, and Kartik (2013) in their Appendix G verify that a variety of familiar classes of distributions, including Pareto distributions, power function distributions (which subsume uniform distributions), Weibull distributions (which subsume exponential distributions), and gamma distributions, satisfy this condition.14 We thank David Levine for drawing our attention to the fact that the standard first order conditions might not be sufficient, especially for large ␥ .…”