Large elections and interim turnout

Akaki Mamageishvili and Oriol Tejada

Games and Economic Behavior, 2023, vol. 137, issue C, 175-210

Abstract: We examine the effect of the interim release of turnout information on elections in a model of a large electorate with a common voting cost, private values, and two alternatives. We consider that (i) one group of citizens votes before the rest and that (ii) the individuals of the second group know the first group's turnout—but not the vote tally—before they vote. The alternative with more votes in total is implemented. Our main result is that there is an equilibrium in which the ex-ante probability that each alternative is implemented is one half and, hence, the same as when no information about turnout is released. We also show several equilibrium properties of our political game which both broaden our theoretical understanding of the costly-voting paradigm and provide testable hypotheses about elections. Our insights remain valid for some extensions of our baseline setup.

Keywords: Elections; Poisson games; Turnout; Private value; Voting costs; Rational voters (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D70 D72 H8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0899825622001312
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:137:y:2023:i:c:p:175-210

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2022.08.003

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().