 A referendum experiment with participation quorumsNo SDES-2015-6, Working Papers from Kochi University of Technology, School of Economics and Management Abstract: This paper analyzes a yes/no referendum in which the outcome is valid only if the voter turnout is greater than a predetermined level. Such a participation quorum is argued to induce the minority group of voters to abstain strategically. Such abstention is intended to adversely affect the outcome by achieving a low voter turnout. We first construct a game-theoretic model to derive a theoretical prediction about the relationship between quorums and voting outcomes. It is shown that there exist multiple equilibria, and that strategic abstention can happen if such a participation quorum is imposed. To examine which type of outcome is more likely to be realized, we then conduct a laboratory experiment. We observe that (i) if the quorum is small, all voters go to the polls, and (ii) if the quorum is large, voters in the ex-ante majority group go to the polls, whereas voters in the ex-ante minority group tend to abstain. As a result, it is less likely that the ex-post minority group wins the referendum. However, when the quorum is large, it frequently happens that the outcome is made invalid because of low voter turnout. Keywords: referendum; participation quorum; voter turnout; strategic abstention; laboratory experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Published in SDE Series, January 2015, pages 1-38 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kch:wpaper:sdes-2015-6 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in Working Papers from Kochi University of Technology, School of Economics and Management Contact information at EDIRC. |
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