Bandwagon voting or false-consensus effect in voting experiments? First results and methodological limits

Ivo Bischoff () and Henrik Egbert ()

No 38, Discussion Papers from Justus Liebig University Giessen, Center for international Development and Environmental Research (ZEU)

Abstract: In an experiment designed to test for expressive voting, Tyran (JPubEc 2004) found a strong positive correlation between the participants' approval to a proposal to donate money for charity and their expected approval rate for fellow voters. This phenomenon can be due to a bandwagon effect or a false consensus effect. Both effects have been reported for voting decisions in the social science literature. Redoing Tyran's experiment and adding new treatments, we provide evidence for a false consensus effect. Following the experimental tradition in economics in not giving false feedback to participants, we are left with only weak tests for the impact of bandwagon motives and find none.

Keywords: voting; experiments; bandwagon; false consensus effect (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/39813/1/587102314.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
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:zbw:zeudps:38

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers from Justus Liebig University Giessen, Center for international Development and Environmental Research (ZEU) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().