Costly voting, turnout, and candidate valence

Early Voting and Turnout

E arly or convenience voting—understood in this context to be relaxed administrative rules and procedures by which citizens can cast a ballot at a time and place other than the precinct on Election Day—is a popular candidate for election reformers. Typically, reformers argue that maximization of turnout is a primary goal, and reducing barriers between voters and the polls is an important method...

Candidate Evaluations and Turnout

Costly voting when both information and preferences differ: is turnout too high or too low?

We study a model of costly voting over two alternatives, where agents’ preferences are determined by both (i) a private preference in favour of one alternative e.g. candidates’ policies, and (ii) heterogeneous information in the form of noisy signals about a commonly valued state of the world e.g. candidate competence. We show that depending on the level of the personal bias (weight on private ...

Habitual Voting and Behavioral Turnout

Bendor, Diermeier, and Ting (2003) develop a behavioral alternative to rational choice models of turnout. However, the assumption they make about the way individuals adjust their probability of voting biases their model towards their main result of significant turnout in large populations. Moreover, the assumption causes individuals to engage in casual voting (sometimes people vote and sometime...

Altruism, Turnout and Strategic Voting Behavior

We consider the problem of costly voting in a game-theoretic framework where agents are altruistic. We show that if, as usual, agents’types are assumed to be independently and identically distributed, the classical theorem of Thomas R. Palfrey and Howard Rosenthal (1985) on the impossibility of large-scale turnout essentially survives, despite the introduction of altruism. We solve this problem...