The perils of democracy

Abstract

In this work we examine a common social dilemma in experimental economics, the public goods game, to determine how voting impacts pro-social behavior. As noted in Markussen, Putterman & Tyran (2014, Review of Economic Studies), a democratic dividend exists. Couching the public goods game in a phenomenon that is playing out in much of the world-drastic income inequality-we examine the decision of groups to share local public goods with groups that have, effectively, no endowment to contribute toward public nor private consumption. Our results show the perils of democracy in that subjects in the position to vote use their advantageous situation to reward the ingroups at the expense of the less endowed outgroup members. * For valuable insights at various stages of this work, we thank the participants at the Pittsburgh Experimental Economics Lab meeting, the Experimental Public Choice Workshop in Lille, the Law and Economics Workshop in Florence and the Public Choice meetings in Charleston. We thank the Catholic University of Lille for the financial support.

Acceptance or rejection of welfare migration—an experimental investigation

“… 14 The results for the decreasing multiplier setting relate to DeAngelo et al. ( 2020 ) who report that subjects in their experiment are less willing to accept out-group members if their participation implies a negative impact on the in-group members in a vc-pgg , i.e., benefiting from the public good without being able to contribute to its generation. …”

“…8 See "Treatment manipulations" for more information on the migration vote and its differences between treatments. 9 In this respect, our design differs from that ofDeAngelo et al (2020) in which migrants cannot immediately integrate into the labor market and, therefore, cannot contribute to the production of a public good but have to rely on social benefits first.…”

Do Rights to Resistance Discipline the Elites? An Experiment on the Threat of Overthrow

“…While we are mainly interested in the disciplining effect of rights to resistance and the threat of overthrow, there could potentially be further effects. A range of experiments show that an institution's efficacy is increased if it was generated endogenously, typically through some form of voting mechanism which adds a "democratic dividend" (Tyran and Feld 2006;Dal Bó et al 2010;Sutter et al 2010;Markussen et al 2014;Hauser et al 2014;DeAngelo et al 2020;Langenbach and Tausch 2019). The overthrow mechanism in our experiment could add such "democratic dividend", as it enables players to influence the social ordering by recurrently reshuffling the ranks.…”

Social hierarchies in democracies and authoritarianism: The balance between power asymmetries and principal-agent chains

“…It is more realistic than the amorphous one as group formation usually occurs by crystallization of small subgroups and through migration (Gürerk et al, 2006). The crystallized CH entails the risk of in-group preferences (DeAngelo et al, 2018; Fu et al, 2012), out-group discrimination (Tajfel, 1970), more inequality, and segregation (Tsvetkova et al, 2018). Thus, it bears a higher possibility of losing its pro-sociality.…”