Contest with attack and defense: does negative campaigning increase or decrease voter turnout?

There are two ways of winning a competition, by increasing one’s own chances of winning or by decreasing those of one’s opponents. I consider a model of contest with attack and defense and propose an application to negative political campaigns, where two candidates choose between disparaging their opponent or valorizing their own image. I provide sufficient conditions for the existence and uniqueness of the symmetric Nash equilibrium of the contest game. Through this model, I then contribute to the controversy concerning the effect of negative campaigning on voter turnout.     

Three-candidate competition when candidates have valence: the base case

We study the Nash Equilibrium of three-candidate unidimensional spatial competition when candidates differ in their non-policy characteristics (valence). If the voters’ policy preferences are represented by a strictly convex loss function, and if the voter density is unimodal and symmetric, then a unique, modulo symmetry, Local Nash Equilibrium exists under fairly plausible conditions. The global Nash Equilibrium, however, exists when only one candidate has a valence advantage (or disadvantage) while the other two candidates have the same valence. An earlier version of this paper appeared as an appendix to Chap. 4 in Evrenk (2004). An erratum to this article can be found at     

Hair loss and electability: The bald truth

This study probes one particular component of the well documented linkage between personal appearance and impression formation by investigating the extent to which and the mechanisms through which bald and balding men are underrepresented in high elective office. Study 1 compares the prevalence of hair loss among governors and members of Congress, on the one hand, and the general public, on the other, and concludes that officeholders are much more likely to have a full head of hair than would be expected of men of their age. Study 2 poses an experimental test of voter bias against bald and balding candidates by presenting voters in a simulated congressional race with materials depicting otherwise identical candidates in either their natural bald or balding condition or wearing a professionally fitted hairpiece. No voter bias against bald or balding candidates is apparent, a finding that suggests that the causal mechanism underlying underrepresentation of bald and balding men is not voter bias.Ugly is a field without grass, a plant without leaves, or a head without hair (Ovid, quoted by Klenhard, 1986, p. 11).Politics represents an area of public life in which the effects of appearance may lead to very important social consequences and in which the idea of special privilege for the pretty is particularly repellent (Efran and Patterson, 1975, p. 352).The authors thank Judee Burgoon, Michael Burgoon, and Carol Sigelman for useful comments and suggestions, and Brandt Baker, Henry Ewbank, Jeff Gardner, Henry Kenski, Dan Singer, and David Williams for their assistance with this project.     

Policy convergence in a two-candidate probabilistic voting model

We propose a generalization of the probabilistic voting model in two-candidate elections. We allow the candidates have general von Neumann–Morgenstern utility functions defined over the voting outcomes. We show that the candidates will choose identical policy positions only if the electoral competition game is constant-sum, such as when both candidates are probability-of-win maximizers or vote share maximizers, or for a small set of functions that for each voter define the probability of voting for each candidate, given candidate policy positions. At the same time, a pure-strategy local Nash equilibrium (in which the candidates do not necessarily choose identical positions) exists for a large set of such functions. Hence, if the candidate payoffs are unrestricted, the “mean voter theorem” for probabilistic voting models is shown to hold only for a small set of probability of vote functions.     

An experiment on coordination in multi-candidate elections: The importance of polls and election histories

Do polls simply measure intended voter behavior or can they affect it and, thus, change election outcomes? Do candidate ballot positions or the results of previous elections affect voter behavior? We conduct several series of experimental, three-candidate elections and use the data to provide answers to these questions. In these elections, we pay subjects conditionally on election outcomes to create electorates with publicly known preferences. A majority (but less than two-thirds) of the voters are split in their preferences between two similar candidates, while a minority (but plurality) favor a third, dissimilar candidate. If all voters voted sincerely, the third candidate — a Condorcet loser — would win the elections. We find that pre-election polls significantly reduce the frequency with which the Condorcet loser wins. Further, the winning candidate is usually the majority candidate who is listed first on the poll and election ballots. The evidence also shows that a shared history enables majority voters to coordinate on one of their favored candidates in sequences of identical elections. With polls, majority-preferred candidates often alternate as election winners.     

A law of large numbers for weighted plurality

Consider an election between $k$ candidates in which each voter votes randomly (but not necessarily independently) for a single candidate, and suppose that there is a single candidate that every voter prefers (in the sense that each voter is more likely to vote for this special candidate than any other candidate). Suppose we have a voting rule that takes all of the votes and produces a single outcome and suppose that each individual voter has little effect on the outcome of the voting rule. If the voting rule is a weighted plurality, then we show that with high probability, the preferred candidate will win the election. Conversely, we show that this statement fails for all other reasonable voting rules. This result is an extension of one by Häggström, Kalai and Mossel, who proved the above in the case $k=2$ .     

Simple manipulation-resistant voting systems designed to elect Condorcet candidates and suitable for large-scale public elections

This article focuses on voting systems that (i) aim to select the Condorcet candidate in the common case where one exists and (ii) impede manipulation by exploiting voter knowledge of electorate preferences. The systems are relatively simple, both mathematically and for voter understanding, and are fully workable for large-scale elections. Their designated equilibrium strategies, under which voters vote sincerely, involve discerning the top one or two candidates in the preference ordering of the electorate. One set of systems uses its ballot to obtain voters’ preference rankings plus approval votes, and tallies the latter if no Condorcet winner exists. It offers solid advantages vis-à-vis instant-runoff voting, which uses a kindred ballot and has attracted recent reformers. Another set of systems uses only approval voting, which is examined from a new angle.     

HAS THE MEDIAN VOTER FOUND A BALLOT BOX THAT HE CAN CONTROL?

This paper examines the appropriateness of the median voter hypothesis within an agenda control framework where the alternative to a proposed expenditure level is the existing level. Evidence from New York State school districts suggests that within this institutional setting the actual level of public service provision does not differ significantly from the median voter's preferred level. The evidence also suggests that demand function parameter estimates for educational expenditures are not sensitive to the assumption that the public service output level corresponds to the median voter's private equilibrium.     

Condorcet efficiency: A preference for indifference

The Condorcet winner in an election is the candidate who would be able to defeat all other candidates in a series of pairwise elections. The Condorcet efficiency of a voting procedure is the conditional probability that it will elect the Condorcet winner, given that a Condorcet winner exists. The study considers the Condorcet efficiency of weighted scoring rules (WSR's) on three candidates for large electorates when voter indifference between candidates is allowed. It is shown that increasing the proportion of voters who have partial indifference will increase the probability that a Condorcet winner exists, and will also increase the Condorcet efficiency of all WSR's. The same observation is observed when the proportion of voters with complete preferences on candidates is reduced. Borda Rule is shown to be the WSR with maximum Condorcet efficiency over a broad range of assumptions related to voter preferences. The result of forcing voters to completely rank all candidates, by randomly breaking ties on candidates that are viewed as indifferent, leads to a reduction in the probability that a Condorcet winner exists and to a reduction in the Condorcet efficiency of all WSR's. Received: 31 July 1999/Accepted: 11 February 2000     

Aggregate uncertainty in the citizen candidate model yields extremist parties

We extend the citizen candidate model of electoral competition with sincere voting to allow for k ≥ 2 states of aggregate uncertainty. We discuss and characterize the equilibrium set in this framework. We provide conditions for the existence of two-party equilibria when k = 2 and show that the policies of the two parties in any such equilibrium are not only divergent but that the parties are extremist: when the political mood is left-wing, the left-wing party wins decisively with a platform that is to the left of the left-wing median voter, while when the political mood is right-wing, the right-wing party wins decisively with a platform that is to the right of the right-wing median voter. We then provide conditions under which such equilibria remain robust for an arbitrary value of k.     

WAGES AND EMPLOYMENT IN PUBLIC-SECTOR UNIONS

We model the politics of wage and employment determination for unionized public-sector workers who can strike. If the employment level affects the identity of the decisive voter in budget referenda and other elections, then unions may be able to increase wages by increasing employment. We identify conditions under which public sector unionization will lead to increased wages and employment; we also show that a majority of voters may favor unionization. (JEL 545, J51, H4)     

Social choice by majority rule with rational participation

This paper explores the social choice properties of majority rule when voters rationally participate in elections. Employing the basic model of voter behavior developed originally by Ledyard (1984) and Palfrey and Rosenthal (1985), we show that when the electorate is sufficiently large, a participation equilibrium exists and is unique. The main result of the paper shows that under these conditions the social preference ordering induced by majority rule is identical to that given by the expected utility of a randomly selected voter, implying the existence of a Condorcet point in the proposal space. A final section provides intuition for the main theorems and relates the equilibrium of this majority rule game to the median voter result.     

Sequential elections with limited information

We develop an incomplete information model of a sequence of elections in a one-dimensional policy space, where voters have no contemporaneous information about candidate positions, and candidates have no information about voter preferences. The only source of information is contemporaneous endorsement data and historical data on the policy positions of previous winning candidates. We define a notion of stationary rational expectations equilibrium, and show that such an equilibrium results in outcomes which are equivalent to those that would occur under full information.We acknowledge support from ISF Grant #SES 82-08184 and #SES84-09654     

The Effect of Residential Concentration on Voter Turnout among Ethnic Minorities

Utilizing a large and unique dataset composed of government records, we study the widely contested effect of co‐ethnic residential concentrations on voter turnout. Non‐Western immigrants are moderately affected by the concentration of co‐ethnic voters in their neighborhoods. As the local concentration of same‐ethnicity voters increases, so does the individual's propensity to turn out for the election. In general, the concentration of non‐Western immigrants in the neighborhood has only a very limited impact on an immigrant's propensity to vote. Finally, we investigate the possible mobilizing effect of local candidates and, in particular, local co‐ethnic candidates on voter turnout. We find that the presence of candidates in general and co‐ethnic candidates running for office in a neighborhood has a moderate positive mobilization effect. However, taking this factor into account, the effect of residential concentrations was not eliminated.     

Bandwagon, underdog, and political competition: the uni-dimensional case

This article studies the effects of bandwagon and underdog on the political equilibrium of two-party competition models. We adapt for voter conformism the generalized Wittman?CRoemer model of political competition, which views political competition as the one between parties with factions of the opportunists and the militants that Nash-bargain one another, and consider three special cases of the general model: the Hotelling?CDowns model, the classical Wittman?CRoemer model, and what we call the ideological-party model. We find that the presence of voter conformism significantly affects the nature of political competition, and its effect on political equilibrium is quite different depending on the model one uses. In the Hotelling?CDowns model, political parties put forth an identical policy at the equilibrium, regardless of the type of voter conformism, and this is the only equilibrium. In both the ideological-party and classical Wittman?CRoemer models, parties propose differentiated policies at the equilibrium, and the extent of policy differentiation depends on the degree of voter conformism.     

The possibility of efficient provision of a public good in voluntary participation games

In this study, we provide the conditions for efficient provision of a public good in a participation game in which a non-negative integer number of units of the public good can be provided. In the case in which at most one unit of the public good can be provided, we provide refinements of Nash equilibria at which agents choose only a Nash equilibrium with an efficient allocation and provide sufficient conditions for cost-sharing rules that guarantee the existence of a Nash equilibrium with an efficient allocation. In the case of a multi-unit public good, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a Nash equilibrium with an efficient allocation and prove that Nash equilibria are less likely to support efficient allocations if the participation of many agents is needed for efficient provision of the public good in the case of identical agents. I would like to thank Koichi Tadenuma, Yukihiro Nishimura, Toshiyuki Fujita, John Weymark, Tatsuyoshi Saijo, Takehiko Yamato, Toshiji Miyakawa, Motohiro Sato, Takashi Shimizu, Nobue Suzuki, and Dirk T. G. Rübbelke for helpful comments and suggestions. I also thank the anonymous referees for detailed comments and suggestions. This research was supported by the Japanese Economic Research Foundation and the Grand-in-Aid for Young Scientists (Start-up) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. Any remaining errors are my own.     

Ballot Paper Cues and the Vote in Australia and Britain: Alphabetic Voting, Sex, and Title

When a voter comes to cast a ballot, some information aboutthe candidates is evident on the ballot paper itself. Usingmultiple regression techniques, this study provides quantitativeestimates of the impact of such information in recent Britishand Australian elections. The results suggest that whether thecandidate's name comes first, middle, or last on the ballotpaper has no effect on the vote in Britain. But it does matterin Australia, partly because voters are more likely to choosecandidates whose names come first, but mostly because the majorparties believe voters will do so and select candidates accordingly.In addition, women candidates are at an electoral disadvantagein Britain and at an even greater disadvantage in Australia.Most, but not all, of this disadvantage comes about becausemajor parties are reluctant to nominate women candidates. Finally,in Britain candidates with an honorary title garner an appreciabledeferential vote although candidates with an academic titledo not. These effects range in size from a modest 2.5 percentof the vote to a substantial 12.5 percent.     

VOLUNTARY CONTRIBUTION GAMES: EFFICIENT PRIVATE PROVISION OF PUBLIC GOODS

This paper reports on a series of laboratory experiments designed to evaluate a mechanism for the voluntary provision of public good. The public good is provided if the total contributions meet or exceed a threshold and all contributions are returned if the public good is not provided. The members of the group all know the threshold, the incomes, and the valuations assigned the public good by all other members. The results support the prediction that this mechanism will yield Pareto efficient outcomes and suggest that economic agents adopt strategies which form equilibria satisfying certain refinements to the Nash equilibrium.     

The more attacks,the more retweets: Trump’s and Clinton’s agenda setting on Twitter

The present study aims to contribute to the agenda setting theory and political campaign literature by examining candidates’ tweets and their effects on voter reactions in the context of the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Content analysis of Donald Trump’s and Hillary Clinton’s 3-month tweets (N = 1575) revealed that half of their tweets were attacks, and those attacks were effective in attracting favorites and retweets for both candidates. Their tweets reflected their issue agendas highlighted on campaign websites, and they mainly emphasized issues owned by their parties in both venues. Some of the issues Trump stressed in his tweets (i.e., media bias and Clinton’s alleged dishonesty) drew significantly more favorites and retweets, suggesting public agenda setting possibilities through Twitter. None of the issues Clinton emphasized were significant predictors of favorites and retweets. However, visual elements such as pictures and videos were effective in bringing voter reactions for Clinton. While Clinton sent twice as many tweets as Trump did during the three months, Trump’s tweet received in average three times as many favorites and retweets as Clinton’s. Overall, the results show that Trump was more successful than Clinton in drawing public attention to preferred issues through Twitter.     

A Signaling Model of Repeated Elections

I develop a two period model of elections in which voters’ first period actions affect candidates’ estimates of voter preferences and thus affect second period electoral and policy outcomes. I find an equilibrium in which centrist voters abstain in the first election, despite facing zero costs of voting and having a strict preference between the alternatives before them. The reason centrists abstain is to signal their preferences to future candidates and thereby promote future policy moderation.For helpful discussions and comments I thank David Austen-Smith, Tim Feddersen, Roger Myerson, Tom Palfrey, Ronny Razin, two anonymous reviewers, and seminar participants at Kellogg, NYU, and the 2000 World Congress of the Game Theory Society.