The Performance of the Pivotal-Voter Model in Small- Scale Elections: Evidence from Texas Liquor Referenda
نویسندگان
چکیده
How well does the pivotal-voter model explain voter participation in smallscale elections? This paper explores this question using data from Texas liquor referenda. It first structurally estimates the parameters of a pivotal-voter model using the Texas data. It then uses the estimates to evaluate both the within and out-of-sample performance of the model. The analysis shows that the model is capable of predicting turnout in the data fairly well, but tends, on average, to predict closer electoral outcomes than are observed in the data. This difficulty allows the pivotal-voter model to be outperformed by a simple alternative model based on the idea of expressive voting. ∗We thank Bill Goffe, Sam Kortum, Stephen Ross, and Birali Runesha for their comments and help. We acknowledge support from the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute. Coate: Department of Economics, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, [email protected]; Conlin: Department of Economics, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY 13244, [email protected]; Moro: Department of Economics, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455 and Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, [email protected]. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis or the Federal
منابع مشابه
The Performance of Pivotal-Voter Models in Small-Scale Elections: Evidence from Texas Liquor Referenda
This paper explores the ability of pivotal-voter models to explain voter behavior in small-scale elections using data from Texas liquor referenda. The findings provide little support for the view that pivotal-voter models are a reasonable theory for understanding small-scale elections. Interestingly, this is not because they cannot explain the levels of turnout in our data, but rather because t...
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