EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Electing in the dark? Voting behavior in light of polarization

Marius D. May ()
Additional contact information
Marius D. May: University of Siegen

SN Business & Economics, 2024, vol. 4, issue 11, 1-29

Abstract: Abstract This paper develops a behavioral public choice model. It provides testable hypothesis to explain voter shifts in European national elections in the last decade. The model comprises three blocs of parties, the government, the opposition and so-called “profiteers”. Retrospective voters evaluate the performance of each bloc. Furthermore, it introduces an exogenous polarizing event that can affect the government’s and the profiteers’ chance to satisfy voters. Moreover, voters are subject to the negativity bias, which means that negative changes in probabilities to satisfy are stronger than positive changes. This framework yields various results on voting behavior under polarization. Most are robust to the introduction of non-voting. The government only profits from polarization iff sufficiently many positively voters are polarized in their favor to outweigh both the negativity bias and the increased competitiveness by profiteers due to polarization. Profiteers, strengthened by polarization, harm the opposition and increase voter turnout. Additionally, a higher negativity bias impairs the government, decreases voter turnout and benefits the opposition and profiteers.

Keywords: Voting behavior; Elections; Retrospective voting; Polarization; Negativity bias; Decision-making (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s43546-024-00697-4 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:spr:snbeco:v:4:y:2024:i:11:d:10.1007_s43546-024-00697-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.springer.com/journal/43546

DOI: 10.1007/s43546-024-00697-4

Access Statistics for this article

SN Business & Economics is currently edited by Gino D'Oca

More articles in SN Business & Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-20
Handle: RePEc:spr:snbeco:v:4:y:2024:i:11:d:10.1007_s43546-024-00697-4