Incomplete information,income redistribution and risk averse median voter behavior

This paper extends the median voter model to include risk aversion. An expected utility maximizing median voter with an aversion to risk may behave differently than a median voter who is certain. A referendum on income redistribution from the top of the distribution to the bottom which fails when the median voter is certain may pass in the extended median voter model. Economic inefficiencies and the net losses accompanying redistribution are shown to play a pivotal role in determining the behavior of the risk averse median voter. The model is illustrated using a one percent Demogrant redistribution. The major motive for government income transfers in the modern world, and in fact throughout history, is simply that the recipients of the money would like to get it and they have the political power ... to implement their desires. Gordon Tullock (1983: 2) Because political transfers seem to violate the standard Pareto norms, we have tended to opt out of any discussion and to say that nothing further can be constructed on the basis of individual evaluations. Once the franchise has been extended to all adults, and once the constitution has allowed income transfers to take place collectively, the formal act of transfer becomes fully predictable from positive economic analysis. The basic property right inheres in the voting franchise ... James M. Buchanan (1984: 187)     

Voting over taxes: the case of tax evasion

This paper studies majority voting on taxes when tax evasion is possible. We characterize the voting equilibrium where the agent with median taxed income is pivotal. Since the ranking of true incomes does not necessarily correspond to the ranking of taxed incomes, the decisive voter can differ from the median income receiver. In this case, we find unconventional patterns of redistribution, e.g., from the middle class to the poor and the rich.     

Political markets, property tax referenda, and local school spending

For better or worse, fiscal decisions made through property tax referenda allow local political markets to work. Demand, supply, and voting process components of such markets are estimated for those Oregon K-12 school districts that held referenda between 1981 and 1986. Various attributes of the median voter were related to school spending, but supply decisions by school boards and administrators were also important. Large districts used state aid to substitute for local property tax revenues on nearly a one-for-one basis, while relying on reversion budgets (inadequate property tax bases and implicit threats of school closures) to extract greater-than-desired spending levels from the median voter.     

Women's suffrage and the growth of the welfare state

In this paper we test the hypothesis that extensions of the voting franchise to include lower income people lead to growth in government, especially growth in redistribution expenditures. The empirical analysis takes advantage of the natural experiment provided by Switzerland's extension of the franchise to women in 1971. Women's suffrage represents an institutional change with potentially significant implications for the positioning of the decisive voter. For various reasons, the decisive voter is more likely to favor increases in governmental social welfare spending following the enfranchisement of women. Evidence indicates that this extension of voting rights increased Swiss social welfare spending by 28% and increased the overall size of the Swiss government.     

Electoral turnout and income redistribution by the state: A cross-national analysis of the developed democracies

Abstract.  This article explores the sources of variation in state redistribution across 13 developed democracies over the period 1979–2000, drawing upon data from the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, the Luxembourg Income Study and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. The discussion begins with the median voter hypothesis, which predicts that the extent of state redistribution in a country will be positively related to the degree of pre-government inequality. In seeking to extend the median voter approach, the article takes into account two additional variables: the level of electoral turnout and the degree to which turnout is skewed by income. The analysis confirms that pre-government inequality is indeed positively related to state redistribution. However, the predictive power of the median voter approach is significantly improved when account is taken of the level of electoral turnout and the extent to which the turnout rate reflects an income skew – variables that are themselves related. The link between turnout and redistribution is especially strong for social transfers as opposed to taxes, and for the lower and middle, as opposed to the upper, part of the income spectrum.     

Split-ticket Voting in Times of Sub-national Government Reorganisation: Evidence from Denmark

Local government amalgamations may have unintended consequences on electoral behaviour. Using the most recent local elections in Denmark as its case, this article demonstrates that inter-level split-ticket voting between three levels (national, regional and local) decreased slightly from 2001 to 2005 – that is, simultaneously with the implementation of a major reform, where many municipalities and all the counties were amalgamated. These amalgamations affect the level of split voting through a process where the local party system operates as an intervening variable: the larger municipalities have a more nationalised local party system, which leads to fewer voters being vote splitters by necessity. The analyses combine general electoral statistics with large voter surveys and benefit from the quasi-experimental setting offered by the fact that not all municipalities were amalgamated.     

The effect of the secret ballot on voter turnout rates

Secrecy in the voting process eliminated an important motivation for voting. No longer able to verify the voters' choices, political parties stopped offering payments in return for votes. Within the rational voter framework, it will be shown that these payments were a prime impetus for people to vote. Without a vote market to cover their voting costs, many voters were rational to stay away from the polls. This hypothesis is supported through a series of empirical tests culminating in a multivariate legislative regression. When other electoral laws are controlled for, the secret ballot accounts for 7 percentage points lower Gubernatorial turnout.     

On the political economy of state highway expenditures: Some evidence of the relative performance of alternative public choice models

This paper explores the extent to which the public demand for roads and/or power of special interest groups determines road expenditures at the state level using an extension of the methodology developed in Congleton and Shughart (1990). Reduced form models of median voter demand, special interest group equilibria, and a combined model are estimated using cross-sectional state data from the United States. We generally find support for the hypothesis that voting matters. The pure median voter models have a better fit than the pure special interest group models. Moreover, in our combined model, we find that variables from the median-voter model can not be dropped without significantly reducing the combined model's fit.     

Representative voter theorems

The representative voter is an individual whose strict preference for any alternative x over any alternative y implies 1) x strictly defeats y by majority rule, if there are an odd number of voters, and 2) x weakly defeats y otherwise. This result holds for the median voter if x is his ideal point or if preferences satisfy a generalized symmetry property, but not in general. We examine a formal condition that guarantees the existence of a representative voter and an economic model in which this condition holds. We also indicate a method for estimating representative voting behavior that is justified when a representative voter exists, and compare this with a method for deriving median voting behavior from an estimated demand curve.     

The Effect of Voting Technology on Voter Turnout: Do Computers Scare the Elderly?

In the aftermath of the Florida debacle in the 2000 Presidential election, there has been an emphasis on replacing voting equipment perceived as inferior (e.g., punch card ballots) with more technologically advanced voting methods. It is possible, however, that not all voters will be comfortable with high-tech voting devices. Elderly voters, for example, might be familiar with the old voting machines but apprehensive about computerized voting. If this is the case, the fear of new voting technology might cause the turnout of elderly voters to decrease. We test for this effect by analyzing the change in voter turnout across Georgia counties in the two most recent gubernatorial elections, as it relates to the share of the counties’ populations that is over the age of 65 years. Consistent with the hypothesis that computers scare the elderly, we find a significantly negative relationship between the change in voter turnout and the elderly share of the population. An additional 1% of the population that is elderly is associated with a 0.3–0.4% decrease in turnout. The hypothesis that elderly voters were apprehensive about the change in voting technology is also supported by the increase in absentee balloting.     

A comparison of cumulative voting and generalized plurality voting

In market based societies consumers are able to express the intensity of their preference for an object by paying more for it. However, under some voting systems, consumers are unable to express the intensity of their preference for a candidate due to the constraint of the “one person, one vote” principle. Cumulative voting maintains the equality of the “one person, one vote” principle by allotting each voter the same number of votes, while also allowing for expression of intensity of candidate preference. This paper provides an experimental analysis of voter behavior under different voting systems.     

The Polarization of American Environmental Policy: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis of Senate and House Votes, 1971–2013

The partisan polarization of environmental policy is an important development in American politics, but it remains unclear how much such polarization reflects voter preferences, as opposed to disagreements between partisan elites. We conduct a regression discontinuity analysis of all major environmental and energy votes in the Senate and the House, 1971–2013. In total, we have 368,974 individual roll call votes by senators and House Representatives. The causal effect of electing a Democrat instead of a Republican in close elections on pro‐environmental voting is large: when a Democrat wins, pro‐environmental voting increases by over 40 percentage points. Because of the quasi‐experimental research design, this difference cannot be attributed to the median voter's preferences. Next, we test hypotheses concerning possible explanations for the elite partisan conflict. The Democrat–Republican gap is the widest when fossil fuel interests make contributions exclusively to Republicans and when state‐level public opinion is polarized.     

Pre-Election Polling and the Rational Voter: Evidence from State Panel Data (1986–1998)

This study examines the role of pre-election perceptions of race closeness, by way of newspaper polls, in motivating citizens to vote on a specific contest while in the voting booth. Results from an error components model (random effects), employing state panel data of concurrent gubernatorial and Senate elections for the period 1986 to 1998, fail to bolster the rational voter hypothesis that perceived closeness matters. The extent to which pre-election perception matters is shown to depend directly on how one measures the likelihood of a close contest. In contrast, few long-standing variables, inherent to the voting literature, have any impact on “within-booth” voting behavior. The majority of within-booth abstention is left unexplained; furthering the notion of Matsusaka and Palda (1999) that the act of voting, indeed, may be random.     

Community size, heterogeneity and voter turnouts

Numerous studies have found a negative relationship between the closeness of an election, the size of the electorate and voter turnout. It is often claimed that this relationship supports the rational voter hypothesis, with closeness and size proxying for the decisiveness of a vote. We offer a different interpretation. Larger communities are more heterogeneous than smaller ones, and turnouts are inversely related to the heterogeneity of a community. We present empirical support for this hypothesis using data for voter turnouts in Norwegian school language referendums. Community size is found to have a negative effect on voter turnouts, even after accounting for the probability of a single vote being decisive and the linguistic dimension of this heterogeneity. Our findings question the adequacy of the turnout regression in testing the rational voter hypothesis, as neither a positive correlation between closeness and turnout, nor a negative correlation between size and turnout can be exclusively attributed to instrumental voting.     

Incorporating groups into rational choice explanations of turnout: An empirical test

This study examines the problem of voter turnout from a rational choice perspective. It reviews the “paradox of voting” and finds one model, which incorporates the role of intermediary social groups and leaders, to be a promising solution. It tests the hypothesis that leader mobilization increases voter turnout, using an ecological analysis of turnout in five Montreal ethnic communities during three recent elections: the 1993 Canadian federal, the 1994 Quebec provincial, and the 1994 Montreal municipal elections. Data on mobilization are taken from semi-directed interviews with association leaders in each community. The results compare predicted and actual rankings of turnout for each community and election. The overall results are weak, indicating that the model does a poor job of predicting voter turnout.     

Political knowledge,the decision calculus,and proximity voting

This paper employs an online voting simulation to examine how the vote decision process affects the vote choice. We focus on proximity voting, an empirically powerful but informationally demanding model of voter behavior. Holding contextual factors constant, we find that more politically knowledgeable individuals engage in a deeper and broader decision process prior to casting their ballot, and, in turn, a more detailed decision process boosts the likelihood that one will vote proximately. In addition, we find that detailed decision processes have a stronger link with proximity voting among the most knowledgeable individuals, who are able to skillfully engage with new information.     

A comparison of prospective and retrospective voting with heterogeneous politicians

A long-standing empirical literature has been concerned with determining whether voters vote “prospectively or “retrospectively.” Despite this interest, little is known about the consequences of one voting regime versus another. This study addresses this deficiency. We find that voter welfare can be greatly affected by the candidate selection technique employed by voters. Among other findings, we show that “electing the best candidate” does not always maximize voter welfare. Furthermore, “myopic” voting is sometimes superior to “farsighted” voting. These findings have implications for interpretations of empirical studies of voter behavior.     

A median voter analysis of variations in the use of property taxes among local governments

This paper explores the variations among local governments in the composition of tax revenues, or more specifically, in the relative use of property taxes. Using a median voter framework, various hypotheses are developed concerning the factors that should influence the relative use of property taxes. A cross-sectional sample of central cities is employed to test the hypotheses. The empirical results are consistent with the hypotheses.     

Ideological change and the economics of voting behavior in the US, 1920–2008

This paper tests the proposition that voters advance a more liberal agenda in prosperous times and turn more conservative in dire economic times. A reference-dependent utility model suggests that, with income growth, the relative demand for public goods increases and the median voter is more likely to vote Democrat. With slowing income growth, the median voter derives increased marginal utility from personal income—making taxation more painful—and is more likely to vote Republican. Ordinary and instrumented analyses of a new time series for the US median voter are encouraging of this income growth model. This work links voting behavior to economic business cycles and shows that ideological change is endogenous to income growth rates.     

Conceptualizing Usage in Voting Behavior for Political Marketing: An Application of Consumer Behavior

Political marketing has borrowed and adapted many terms from mainstream marketing, such as image management (segmentation, targeting, and positioning) and consumer (voter). In marketing, the terms “user” and “usage” have been established, yet their application to political marketing is less clear. This paper analyzes the feasibility and usefulness of usage in the political context. Drawing from the literature on usage, a model is developed and applied to four voting environments: Britain, Australia, Russia, and Belarus. One critical factor that emerges is the concept of choice, whereby the voter may chose to indicate their preference for one party yet be forced to use a different party as chosen by collective choice. Another issue is the potential for habitual voting behavior to limit decision making. It is concluded that usage needs to be contextualized specifically for political marketing.