 Voting as a Signaling DeviceR. Emre Aytimur (), Aristotelis Boukouras and Robert Schwager No 3700, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Abstract: In this paper, citizens vote in order to influence the election outcome and in order to signal their unobserved characteristics to others. The model is one of rational voting and generates the following predictions: (i) The paradox of not voting does not arise, because the benefit of voting does not vanish with population size. (ii) Turnout in elections is positively related to the size of the local community and the importance of social interactions. (iii) Voting may exhibit bandwagon effects and small changes in the electoral incentives may generate large changes in turnout due to signaling effects. (iv) Signaling incentives increase the sensitivity of turnout to voting incentives in communities with low opportunity cost of social interaction, while the opposite is true for communities with high cost of social interaction. Therefore, the model predicts that smaller communities have more volatile turnout than larger communities. Keywords: electoral incentives; signaling; voting (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:ces:ceswps:_3700 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC. |
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