Deliberative structures and their impact on voting under economic conflict

Jordi Brandts (), Leonie Gerhards and Lydia Mechtenberg
Additional contact information
Jordi Brandts: Institut d’Anàlisi Econòmica (CSIC) and Barcelona GSE, Campus UAB
Leonie Gerhards: Universität Hamburg
Lydia Mechtenberg: Institut d’Anàlisi Econòmica (CSIC) and Barcelona GSE, Campus UAB

Experimental Economics, 2022, vol. 25, issue 2, No 10, 680-705

Abstract: Abstract We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate how different deliberative structures of varying inclusiveness affect collective decisions in the presence of economic conflict. An electorate consists of two groups, one informed and one uninformed about an uncertain state of the economy. This state affects payoffs differently for the two groups. We study three deliberative structures that vary in how the uninformed are included in pre-vote communication. Compared with a setting without any communication, we find that communication in all three deliberation treatments leads to more frequent votes for the efficient policies. The most inclusive deliberative structure motivates more truthfulness, more trust, more cooperativeness (i.e. refraining from protest votes), and more votes for the efficient policies, than the least inclusive structure. However, comparison among the deliberation treatments reveals that the most inclusive deliberative structure is not the one that generates the highest degree of truthfulness. The dynamics of communication lead to a general deterioration of truth-telling and cooperativeness, reinforced by the use of disrespectful and uncooperative language.

Keywords: Communication; Economic conflict; Experiments; C92; D9 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10683-021-09729-4 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:kap:expeco:v:25:y:2022:i:2:d:10.1007_s10683-021-09729-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ry/journal/10683/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10683-021-09729-4

Access Statistics for this article

Experimental Economics is currently edited by David J. Cooper, Lata Gangadharan and Charles N. Noussair

More articles in Experimental Economics from Springer, Economic Science Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().