Counting on My Vote Not Counting: Expressive Voting in Committees

Boris Ginzburg, Jose-Alberto Guerra and Warn Nuarpear Lekfuangfu

No 18250, Documentos CEDE from Universidad de los Andes, Facultad de Economía, CEDE

Abstract: A committee chooses whether to approve a proposal that some members may consider ethical. Members who vote for the proposal receive expressive utility, and all pay a cost if the proposal is accepted. Committee members have different depths of reasoning. The model predicts that features that reduce the probability of being pivotal - namely, larger committee size, or a more restrictive voting rule - raise the share of votes for the proposal. A laboratory experiment with a charitable donation framing supports these results. Our structural estimation recovers the distributions of altruistic and expressive preferences, and of depth of reasoning, across individuals.

Keywords: expressive voting; committees; pivotality; laboratory experiment; level-k; structural estimation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C57 C72 C92 D71 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 66
Date: 2020-07-13
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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https://repositorio.uniandes.edu.co/bitstream/handle/1992/41138/dcede2020-26.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Counting on my vote not counting: Expressive voting in committees (2022)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:col:000089:018250

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