Public Voting and Prosocial Behavior

Public Versus Secret Voting in Committees

“…The fact that the same subjects were exposed to two di¤erent treatments, allows us to perform a rigorous analysis controlling for individual …xed e¤ects. 27 We start by examining the determinants of a correct vote by informed agents. Table 7 presents the results of linear probability models where the dependent variable is a dummy that equals one if the individual voted correctly and zero otherwise.…”

“…For single decision makers see Maskin and Tirole[23], Morris[26] and Prat[31].9 See also Morton and Ou[27] for an empirical investigation of whether secret voting leads to less prosocial voting behavior than public voting.…”

Voting for Compromises: Alternative Voting Methods in Polarized Societies

“…The behavioral literature mostly considers sincerity with respect to the preferences induced in this way. However, a large literature in economics and political science shows that preferences take into account both inequality and efficiency (Fehr and Schmidt, 1999;Bolton and Ockenfels, 2000;Charness and Rabin, 2002;Feddersen et al, 2009;Bechtel et al, 2018;Morton and Ou, 2019). Hence, our voters' true preferences may differ from monetarily-induced ones.…”

“…Social conventions and appealing political and economic principles do not always succeed in providing "moral roots" (Haidt, 2008) and facilitating coordination on moderate alternatives. Yet, these principles still enjoy generalized support, even in polarized societies, and have been shown to be important determinants of actual voter behavior (e.g., Feddersen et al, 2009;Fisman et al, 2017;Morton and Ou, 2019). Key among them is equity (equal treatment of individuals), which underlies many prominent sociopolitical ideas, from distributive justice to equality of opportunities.…”

“…Strategic voting has indeed been shown to be empirically relevant (e.g., Black, 1978;Fisher, 2004) and to vary with voter characteristics (Eggers and Vivyan, 2020). However, both equity and efficiency have been empirically demonstrated to be key determinants of actual human behavior for distributive decisions (Fehr and Schmidt, 1999;Bolton and Ockenfels, 2000;Charness and Rabin, 2002;Bechtel et al, 2018) and actual voting behavior (Feddersen et al, 2009;Shayo and Harel, 2012;Morton and Ou, 2019). Linking individual equity-efficiency trade-offs to political decisions during the 2012 US elections, Fisman et al (2017) found that the majority of equality-focused subjects did vote for Barack Obama (and were democrats), indicating that distributional preferences are a strong motive underlying voting behavior.…”