DECEPTION AND POLITICAL PARTICIPATION: THEORY AND LABORATORY EVIDENCE

We model two‐candidate elections in which (1) voters are uncertain about candidates' attributes; and (2) candidates can inform voters of their attributes by sending advertisements. We compare between political campaigns with truthful advertising and campaigns in which there is a small chance of deceptive advertising. Our model predicts that voters should vote in‐line with an advertisement's information. We test our model's predictions using laboratory elections. We find, in the presence of even a small probability that an advertisement is deceptive, voters become substantially more likely to elect a “low‐quality” candidate. We discuss implications of this for existing models of voting decisions. (JEL C92, D72, D82)     

ATTRIBUTION ERROR IN ECONOMIC VOTING: EVIDENCE FROM TRADE SHOCKS

This article exploits the international transmission of business cycles to examine the prevalence of attribution error in economic voting in a large panel of countries from 1990 to 2009. We find that voters, on average, exhibit a strong tendency to oust the incumbent governments during an economic downturn, regardless of whether the recession is home‐grown or merely imported from trading partners. However, we find important heterogeneity in the extent of attribution error. A split sample analysis shows that countries with more experienced voters, more educated voters, and possibly more informed voters—all conditions that have been shown to mitigate other voter agency problems—do better in distinguishing imported from domestic growth. (JEL E3, E6)     

SYMMETRIC SCORING RULES AND A NEW CHARACTERIZATION OF THE BORDA COUNT

Young developed a classic axiomatization of the Borda rule almost 50 years ago. He proved it is the only voting rule satisfying the normative properties of decisiveness, neutrality, reinforcement, faithfulness and cancellation. Often overlooked is that the uniqueness of Borda applies only to variable populations. We present a different set of properties which only Borda satisfies when both the set of voters and the set of alternatives can vary. It is also shown Borda is the only scoring rule which will satisfy all of the new properties when the number of voters stays fixed. (JEL D71, D02, H00)     

On complexity and lotteries' evaluation – three experimental observations

We present experimental evidence suggesting that human subjects penalize lotteries for complexity. Our results contradict the assumption that human agents follow the discounted expected utility model in multi-period choice with uncertainty. In particular, we show that the buying price offered for an inferior, simple multi-period lottery may sometimes significantly exceed the buying price offered for a better, yet more complicated, alternative, when the lotteries are sold to a group of subjects in a first-price auction. We discuss the possibility to modify the existing models of choice to this “complexity effect”.     

VOTING EXPRESSIVELY

We address a common criticism directed toward models of expressive voting that they are ad hoc in nature. To that end, we propose a foundation for expressive behavior that is based on a novel theory of social preferences under risk. Under our proposal, expressive considerations in behavior arise from the particular way in which risky social prospects are assessed by decision‐makers who want to interpret their choices as moral. To illustrate the scope of our framework, we use it to address some key questions in the literature on expressive voting: why, for expressive considerations, might voters vote against their self‐interest in large elections and why might such elections exhibit a moral bias. Specifically, we consider an electoral set‐up with two alternatives and explain why, when the size of the electorate is large, voters may want to vote for the alternative they deem morally superior even if this alternative happens to be strictly less preferred, in an all‐inclusive sense, than the other. (JEL D01, D03, D81, D72, A13)     

An informationally parsimonious impartial observer theorem

In Harsanyi's impartial observer theorem, an impartial observer determines a social ordering of the lotteries on the set of social alternatives based on a sympathetic but impartial concern for all individuals in society. This ordering is derived from a more primitive ordering on the set of all extended lotteries. An extended lottery is a lottery which determines both the observer's personal identity and the social alternative. We establish a version of Harsanyi's theorem in which the observer is only required to have preferences on the extended lotteries in which there is an equal chance of being any person in society. Received: 19 June 1996 / Accepted: 30 December 1996     

How to choose a non-controversial list with k names

Barberà and Coelho (WP 264, CREA-Barcelona Economics, 2007) documented six screening rules associated with the rule of k names that are used by diferent institutions around the world. Here, we study whether these screening rules satisfy stability. A set is said to be a weak Condorcet set à la Gehrlein (Math Soc Sci 10:199–209) if no candidate in this set can be defeated by any candidate from outside the set on the basis of simple majority rule. We say that a screening rule is stable if it always selects a weak Condorcet set whenever such set exists. We show that all of the six procedures which are used in reality do violate stability if the voters do not act strategically. We then show that there are screening rules which satisfy stability. Finally, we provide two results that can explain the widespread use of unstable screening rules.     

Legalization of lotteries in the 1980s

The decade of the 1980s has witnessed an explosion in legalized gambling. Most dramatic has been the growth of state-sponsored lotteries. The spread of these state-operated lotteries is the result of pressure for more revenues for state operating costs. Lotteries are viewed as a means of raising these revenues: In 1987, state-operated lotteries grossed over $12 billion in sales. Eight states had sales exceeding $1 billion (New York Times, 1988). Clearly, state lotteries have become big business. The purpose of this article is to describe the spread of lotteries in the 1980s and to note the minimal attention given to compulsive gambling in debates on lotteries.Mr. Braidfoot is General Counsel for the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is the author ofGambling: The Deadly Game.     

A Social Choice Lemma on Voting Over Lotteries with Applications to a Class of Dynamic Games

We prove a lemma characterizing majority preferences over lotteries on a subset of Euclidean space. Assuming voters have quadratic von Neumann–Morgenstern utility representations, and assuming existence of a majority undominated (or “core”) point, the core voter is decisive: one lottery is majority-preferred to another if and only if this is the preference of the core voter. Several applications of this result to dynamic voting games are discussed.This paper was completed after Jeff Banks’s death. John Duggan is deeply indebted to him for his friendship and his collaboration on this and many other projects.     

On the manipulation of social choice correspondences

Duggan and Schwartz (Soc Choice and Welfare 17: 85–93, 2000) have proposed a generalization of the Gibbard–Satterthwaite Theorem to multivalued social choice rules. They show that only dictatorial rules are strategy-proof and satisfy citizens sovereignty and residual resoluteness. Citizens sovereignty requires that each alternative is chosen at some preference profile. Residual resoluteness compels the election to be single-valued when the preferences of the voters are “similar”. We propose an alternative proof to the Duggan and Schwartz’s Theorem. Our proof highlights the crucial role of residual resoluteness. In addition, we prove that every strategy-proof and onto social choice correspondence concentrates the social decision power in the hands of an arbitrary group of voters. Finally, we show that this result still holds in a more general framework in which voters report their preferences over sets of alternatives.     

Ensuring every candidate wins under positional voting

Given a fixed set of voter preferences, different candidates may win outright given different scoring rules. We investigate how many voters are able to allow all n candidates to win for some scoring rule. We will say that these voters impose a disordering on these candidates. The minimum number of voters it takes to impose a disordering on three candidates is nine. For four candidates, six voters are necessary, for five candidates, four voters are necessary, and it takes only three voters to disorder nine candidates. In general, we prove that m voters can disorder n candidates when m and n are both greater than or equal to three, except when m = 3 and n ≤ 8, when n = 3 and m ≤ 8, and when n = 4 and m = 4 or 5.     

EDUCATION'S GAMBLING PROBLEM: EARMARKED LOTTERY REVENUES AND CHARITABLE DONATIONS TO EDUCATION

I examine the impact that lotteries introduced to support education have on voluntary contributions to education. State lotteries, and the causes they are introduced to support, are highly publicized. This provides the opportunity to assess whether donors are crowded‐out by government spending of which they are almost certainly aware. Using donor‐level survey data and nonprofits' tax returns, I find that donations to education‐related organizations fall with the introduction of a lottery. This result is driven by donors' response to the new (highly publicized) government revenue source (rather than a decrease in nonprofit fundraising efforts). (JEL D64, H3, H75)     

Media use and political learning: Comparing Trump supporters to celebrity candidate voters

This study examines whether political media use behaviors of voters who supported Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election align with those of “celebrity candidate voters” portrayed in the literature. The study used a national online survey (N = 1,608) conducted during the 2016 primary, and findings reveal that Trump supporters, more than other voters, are driven by entertainment motivations and follow campaign news using entertainment media: specifically, the video-sharing site YouTube. Although Trump voters are interested in the campaign, their level of political knowledge is lower than other voters, and no one media outlet made a significant contribution to their learning. A comparison group of other voters showed significant knowledge gains from news websites and Twitter. Results for Trump voters are consistent with scholars’ characterization of the celebrity candidate audience, particularly in studies suggesting that celebrity politicians may increase citizens’ engagement through entertainment gratifications rather than by a desire to become informed.     

Finding the majority-rule equilibrium under lexicographic comparison of candidates

This paper considers the well studied problem of the existence of an undominated point, under the assumption of lexicographic preferences of voters, as espoused by Taylor in [24]. We extend Taylor's model to situations were we allow for (i) voters to have different ranings of the issues in n-dimensional issue space and (ii) a candidate to be disregarded by a voter if his stand on any one or more of the issues involved in the election is perceived to be too extreme by the voter and (iii) combinations of (i) and (ii). We extend the results of Taylor by demonstrating the non-existence of an equilibrium point in these models in general and then showing that under special circumstances, specialized variants of the “median” point(s) represent equilibrium or undominated points in these models too. Thus a model of voting behavior results that is closer approximation of reality in that historically incumbents tend to win. The primary conclusion of the paper is to suggest that incumbents tend to have an advantage when the election process is characterized by a large presence of special interests or as information becomes more expensive to acquire. Received: 13 February 1996 / Accepted: 27 March 1997     

DRAWN INTO VIOLENCE: EVIDENCE ON “WHAT MAKES A CRIMINAL” FROM THE VIETNAM DRAFT LOTTERIES

Draft lottery number assignment during the Vietnam Era provides a natural experiment to examine the effects of military service on crime. Using exact dates of birth for inmates in state and federal prisons in 1979, 1986, and 1991, we find that draft eligibility increases incarceration for violent crimes but decreases incarceration for nonviolent crimes among whites. This is particularly evident in 1979, where two‐sample instrumental variable estimates indicate that military service increases the probability of incarceration for a violent crime by 0.34 percentage points and decreases the probability of incarceration for a nonviolent crime by 0.30 percentage points. We conduct two falsification tests, one that applies each of the three binding lotteries to unaffected cohorts and another that considers the effects of lotteries that were not used to draft servicemen. (JEL K42, H56)     

DYNASTIC POLITICAL PRIVILEGE AND ELECTORAL ACCOUNTABILITY: THE CASE OF U.S. GOVERNORS, 1950–2005

This paper examines the impact of dynastic political privilege on the behavior of incumbents. Incumbents have opportunities to serve themselves at the expense of voters, but society can design political institutions to mitigate these principal‐agent problems. Dynastic political privilege may be one such mechanism. We argue that the possibility that opportunistic behavior in office may damage family members' political prospects disciplines incumbents. We test this hypothesis using data for 1950–2005 on U.S. governors, including a new data set on the family relationships of politicians, and find that dynastic political privilege increases incumbent accountability. (JEL H71, H10)     

EVIDENCE ON ELECTORAL ACCOUNTABILITY IN THE U.S. SENATE: ARE UNFAITHFUL AGENTS REALLY PUNISHED?

Many have questioned whether voters are able to hold incumbent officials electorally accountable through a retrospective voting strategy. We examine U.S. Senate elections from 1962 to 1990 in forty-one states, explaining which incumbents ran for reelection and their success in seeking reelection. We find that an incumbent's deviation from her state party platform decreases the probability that she will run for reelection and win if she runs. Furthermore, the electoral mechanism is found to be more efficient when voters are better informed. Finally, we find that our divergent party platform model provides a better fit than the median voter model.     

Effects of pronoun use in campaign advertisements on young Taiwanese voters

Campaign advertisements can greatly influence voters; however, the effects of subtle variations in advertising content have rarely been investigated. This study was conducted to quantify the effects of minor variations in pronoun use on young Taiwanese voters’ responses to campaign advertisements. Also examined were the moderating effects of voters’ perceptions of the candidate’s personality characteristics as shaped by the candidate’s physical appearance and the camera angle used in the candidate’s photo. The experimental results indicated that the use of the pronoun “we” in a campaign advertisement led to a closer perceived relationship between voters and the candidate compared to the inclusive pronoun “you,” which generated better advertising effects. Moreover, the results showed that when the voters visually inferred that a candidate had higher competence or when the candidate was photographed from a low angle, which created the perception of greater power, the use of the pronoun “we” was more suitable. The inclusive “you,” in contrast, was more suitable for candidates that were perceived by the voters to have greater warmth or for candidates that were photographed from a high angle, which created the perception of less power.     

Two-stage electoral competition in two-party contests: persistent divergence of party positions

Models of party competition building on Downs (1957) have recognized that there are centrifugal and centripetal forces in party competition; but one such force, the existence of party primaries, has been remarkably neglected in recent literature. We consider party/candidate policy divergence in two-party competition in one dimension where there is a two-stage electoral process, e.g., a primary election (or caucus) among party supporters to select that party’s candidate followed by a general election. We develop a model in which (some or all) voters in the primary election are concerned with the likelihood that the primary victor will be able to win the general election and being concerned with that candidate’s policy position. This model is similar in all but technical details to that given in an almost totally neglected early paper in Public Choice Coleman (1971) 11:35–60, but we offer important new results on electoral dynamics for candidate locations. In addition to accounting for persistent party divergence by incorporating a more realistic model of the institutions that govern elections in the U.S., the model we offer gives rise to predictions that match a number of important aspects of empirical reality such as frequent victories for incumbents and greater than otherwise expected electoral success for the minority party in situations where that party has its supporters more closely clustered ideologically than the supporters of the larger party (in particular, with a concentration of voters between the party mean and the population mean).A much earlier version of this paper was presented at the Annual Meeting of the Public Choice Society, Long Beach, California, March 24–26, 1995. We are indebted to Dorothy Green and to Clover Behrend-Gethard for bibliographic assistance and to Nicholas Miller and the late Peter Aranson for helpful suggestions.