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on Collective Decision-Making |
| By: | Cantoni, Enrico; Pons, Vincent; Schäfer, Jérôme |
| Abstract: | In recent years, voter ID laws and convenience voting have generated heated partisan debates. To shed light on these policy issues, we survey the recent evidence on the institutional determinants and effects of voter turnout and broaden the perspective beyond the most debated rules. We begin by discussing the importance of electoral participation both for its consequences on policy choices and for democratic legitimacy. Building on a simple cost-benefit model of voting, we then review (quasi)-experimental work studying the effects of voting procedures and of other election rules. Voting procedures (which determine how people vote) primarily affect the cost of participation. The obstacles they create matter more when they occur ahead of the election, when the stakes are not salient (e.g., voter registration requirements), and less when parties mobilize voters against them and when alternative ways to vote exist (e.g., when people can choose whether to vote by mail or in person). Election rules upstream from the election (such as campaign finance laws) and downstream (such as the use of proportional representation vs. plurality rule to map vote choices into a set of election winners) mostly operate through benefits, for instance by affecting electoral competitiveness and the number of candidates. We conclude by highlighting questions for future research. |
| Keywords: | Voter turnout; Political institutions; Causal inference |
| JEL: | D72 D73 J15 P00 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:19447 |
| By: | Acemoglu, Daron; Aksoy, Cevat Giray; Baysan, Ceren; Molina, Carlos; Zeki, Gamze |
| Abstract: | This paper investigates whether enduring authoritarian regimes are in part rooted in the population’s misperceptions about their social and economic costs–as opposed to a general preference for authoritarianism. We explore this question using online and field experiments in the context of Türkiye’s May 2023 presidential and parliamentary elections. We confirm that voters, especially those supporting the incumbent authoritarian government systematically underestimate both the extent to which democracy and media freedom have been eroded in Türkiye and their usefulness in dealing with natural disasters and corruption (two salient issues in Türkiye). We find that providing (accurate) information about the state and implications of democracy and media freedom have significant effects on beliefs and increase the likelihood of voting for the opposition by about 3.7 percentage points (6.2 percent) in the online experiment. In the field experiment, the ballot-box level opposition vote share in neighborhoods receiving the information treatment increases by 0.8 percentage point (1.5 percent). Interestingly, both in the field and online, the results are driven not by further mobilizing opposition supporters, but by influencing those likely to vote for the governing coalition and those holding more misperceived beliefs about democracy and media freedom in Türkiye. The evidence suggests that at least part of the support for authoritarian regimes may be coming from misperceptions about their institutions and policies, and may be more malleable than typically presumed. |
| Keywords: | Democracy; Misperceptions; Elections; Institutions |
| JEL: | P16 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:19536 |
| By: | Yatish Arya (Ashoka University); Anisha Garg (University of Waarwick) |
| Abstract: | Can civic infrastructure shape political competition? We study public parks in Delhi, combining electoral returns with novel data on the RSS, a Hindu nationalist organization closely associated with the BJP. Using predetermined recreational land allocations from the 1962 Master Plan as an instrument for park access, we find that a one-standard-deviation increase raises the BJP-led alliance’s (BJP+) vote share by 1.92 percentage points and increases RSS presence. Yet this advantage is not fixed: across four Delhi elections from 2008 to 2020, the relationship between park access and BJP+ vote share is positive in three but weakens sharply in 2013, when the park-related advantage shifts toward the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), which emerged from an anti-corruption movement that mobilized through public spaces. The findings suggest that civic infrastructure lowers the spatial costs of political organization, benefiting actors able to mobilize through it. |
| Date: | 2026–08–19 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ash:wpaper:167 |
| By: | Battaglini, Marco; Palfrey, Thomas R |
| Abstract: | We study the volunteer’s dilemma in environments with heterogeneous preferences and private information. We characterize the efficiency properties of equilibrium, which is a departure from all the previous literature that focuses only on the probability of group success. While the probability of success may be non-monotonic in the size of the group, we show that per-capita welfare is always increasing for all types, strictly for sufficiently high types. As group size increases, the expected utility of every type converges to the expected utility of the type with the lowest possible cost, which is the same expected utility when there is no free rider problem, i.e., when there is only a single player in the game and that player has the lowest possible cost. |
| JEL: | D71 D72 |
| Date: | 2024–09 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:19544 |
| By: | Théo Konc; Jan Christoph Steckel; Jacob Edenhofer; Jens Ewald; Thomas Sterner |
| Abstract: | We study the political consequences of Germany's 2022–2023 electricity price increases using four waves of original panel data. Identification exploits the German billing system, under which suppliers raise monthly instalment payments at dates plausibly exogenous to household characteristics. In a staggered difference-in-differences design with later-treated households as controls, those facing an above-median increase become 7.5 percentage points more likely to support the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD). The shift persists, and attitudes, including support for climate policy, adjust only afterwards. This response emerges even though no climate policy caused the shock, households could not anticipate it, parties at both political extremes opposed the underlying sanctions, and compensation was generous. We interpret our reduced-form results in a spatial voting framework in which the loss raises the value of a party's promise of lower future energy costs. Our results imply that the standard welfare-economic separation of efficiency from distribution can carry a political cost even when compensation is generous and non-distortionary. |
| Keywords: | political backlash, energy price increase, right wing populism, panel data |
| JEL: | C23 D30 D63 D72 H23 H50 Q40 |
| Date: | 2026 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:ces:ceswps:_12887 |
| By: | Kim, Minseong |
| Abstract: | Bayesian finite-mixture election-forensics models in the tradition of Mebane (2016) classify vote-counting units as clean or fraudulent from aggregate turnout and vote-share data alone, without independent evidence of manipulation. We evaluate the eforensics quasi-binomial-logistic (qbl) model against 20 years of Korean elections (2002-2025), fitting 228 separate model runs spanning general and presidential elections, two aggregation levels, up to five vote-counting channels, and, critically, two independently constructed fraud-free synthetic controls calibrated to match each real dataset's turnout and vote-share marginals without any fraud-generating mechanism. We find that the model reports substantial "fraud" (5-31% of units, up to 8.7 million "fraudulent" votes) on data that is fraud-free by construction; that real-data fraud-share estimates correlate at r=0.98 with their fraud-free null counterparts across 58 paired cells; that the model's largest real-data estimates fall on presidential elections held before Korea had early voting or any fraud allegations (2002-2012), exceeding what it reports for the actually contested 2020 election; and that recoding the model to test fraud in the opposite (conservative-favoring) direction reproduces the identical pathology, including assigning more false-positive fraud to the one pre-2014 election with a genuine historical manipulation allegation than to the allegation's own claimed direction. We conclude that the model's output depends on the shape of the (turnout, vote-share) distribution, not on fraud, and that this failure is not fixable by post-hoc recalibration, since recalibrating for validity would remove essentially all detected signal in the corpus. |
| Date: | 2026–07–15 |
| URL: | https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:osf:socarx:6ka47_v1 |