全球智库信息集成服务系统(G2TT): DP5679 When is Democracy an Equilibrium? Theory and Evidence from Colombia's La Violencia

G2TT

来源类型	Discussion paper
规范类型	论文
来源ID	DP5679
	DP5679 When is Democracy an Equilibrium? Theory and Evidence from Colombia's La Violencia
	James Robinson; Ragnar Torvik; Mario Chacón
发表日期	2006-05-12
出版年	2006
语种	英语
摘要	This paper studies the effects that the revelation of information on the electorate's preferences has on voters' turnout decisions. The experimental data show that closeness in the division of preferences induces a significant increase in turnout. Moreover, for closely divided electorates (and only for these electorates) the provision of information significantly raises the participation of subjects supporting the slightly larger team relative to the smaller team. This behaviour contradicts the qualitative predictions of the unique quasi-symmetric Nash equilibrium of the theoretical model. We show that the heterogeneous effect of information on the participation of subjects in different teams is driven by the subjects' (incorrect) beliefs of casting a pivotal vote. Simply put, subjects overestimate the probability of casting a pivotal vote when they belong to the team with a slight majority, and choose the strategy that maximizes their utility based on their inflated probability assessment. Empirical evidence on gubernatorial elections in the U.S. between 1990 and 2005 is consistent with our main experimental result. Namely, we observe that the difference in the actual vote tally between the party leading according to the polls and the other party is larger than the one predicted by the polls only in closely divided electorates. We provide a behavioural model that explains the main findings of our experimental and empirical analyses.
主题	Public Economics
关键词	Voter turnout Public opinion polls Experimental economics
URL	https://cepr.org/publications/dp5679
来源智库	Centre for Economic Policy Research (United Kingdom)
资源类型	智库出版物
条目标识符	http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/534519
推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714	James Robinson,Ragnar Torvik,Mario Chacón. DP5679 When is Democracy an Equilibrium? Theory and Evidence from Colombia's La Violencia. 2006.