Is there really a turnout paradox?

Luis Fernando Medina
Additional contact information
Luis Fernando Medina: CEACS - Juan March Institute Madrid, Spain and Universidad Externado de Colombia, Bogata, Colombia, lfmedina@march.es

Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2011, vol. 23, issue 3, 382-399

Abstract: This paper challenges the notion that voting games with purely instrumental players cannot account for high turnout (the ‘turnout paradox’). Although it has been known for over 25 years that such games can generate high-turnout equilibria, the said equilibria have been rejected on the grounds that they are fragile. This paper shows that this claim is incorrect because it is based on a computation of pivot probabilities that is not consistent with equilibrium analysis. Once the relevant computations are corrected, it becomes possible to obtain upper bounds on the cost of voting compatible with high-turnout equilibria showing that these equilibria are indeed quite robust. This paper concludes by extending the model to include continuous outcome functions, showing that while they preserve the high-turnout equilibria obtained before, they allow for better characterizations of the results.

Keywords: elections; game theory; turnout paradox; voting models (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0951629811411750 (text/html)

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:sae:jothpo:v:23:y:2011:i:3:p:382-399

DOI: 10.1177/0951629811411750

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Journal of Theoretical Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().