 (Don’t) Make My Vote CountMarco Faravelli and Santiago Sánchez-Pagés Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2015, vol. 27, issue 4, 544-569 Abstract: Proponents of proportional electoral rules often argue that majority rule depresses turnout and may lower welfare due to the ‘tyranny of the majority’ problem. The present paper studies the impact of electoral rules on turnout and social welfare. We analyze a model of instrumental voting where citizens have private information over their individual cost of voting and over the alternative they prefer. The electoral rule used to select the winning alternative is a combination of majority rule and proportional rule. Results show that the above arguments against majority rule do not hold in this set up. Social welfare and turnout increase with the weight that the electoral rule gives to majority rule in a close election, while they are independent of the electoral rule when the expected size of the minority tends to zero. However, more proportional rules can increase turnout within the minority group; this effect is stronger the smaller the minority group. We provide a general version of the competition effect, i.e. that turnout in close elections is higher than in biased elections, independently of the systems adopted in the two cases. Keywords: Costly voting; majority rule; proportional rule; turnout (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:jothpo:v:27:y:2015:i:4:p:544-569 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Journal of Theoretical Politics |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.