The Marginal Voter's Curse

Helios Herrera, Aniol Llorente-Saguer and Joseph McMurray ()
Additional contact information
Helios Herrera: University of Warwick

No 798, Working Papers from Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance

Abstract: This paper proposes a rational model of voter participation by generalizing a common-value model of costless voting to include not just pivotal voting but also marginal voting incentives. A new strategic incentive for abstention arises in that case, to avoid the marginal voter's curse of pushing the policy outcome in the wrong direction. The marginal voter's curse presents a larger disincentive for voting than the swing voter's curse. Moreover, marginal motivations are shown to dominate pivotal motivations in large elections. Model predictions are confirmed in a laboratory experiment and applied in a comparative analysis of electoral rules.

Keywords: Turnout; Information aggregation; Underdog effect; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C92 D70 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-06-28
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.qmul.ac.uk/sef/media/econ/research/wor ... 2016/items/wp798.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: The Marginal Voter's Curse (2019)
Working Paper: The Marginal Voter's Curse (2016)
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:qmw:qmwecw:798

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Queen Mary University of London, School of Economics and Finance Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Nicholas Owen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).