Threshold Disclosure in Collective Decisions

Luca Braghieri, Leonardo Bursztyn and Jan Fasnacht

No 21485, CEPR Discussion Papers from Centre for Economic Policy Research

Abstract: Voting-based collective decisions are typically made either anonymously or publicly. Anonymous voting protects truthful expression but conceals individual behavior; public voting provides information about individual votes, but, when one option is socially stigmatized, it can distort participation and choices. We introduce threshold majority voting, in which voters choose a disclosure threshold determining whether and when their votes are revealed. In an experiment at UC Berkeley on the participation of transgender women in women’s sports, public voting nearly doubles abstention and reduces support for the stigmatized option. Threshold voting eliminates these distortions while revealing one-third of individual votes.

JEL-codes: C93 D72 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-05
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