Spatial elections with endorsements and uninformed voters: Some laboratory experiments

This paper presents a laboratory experiment designed to examine voting behavior, within a spatial election framework, when subjects are only endowed with endorsement information. In the experiment, subjects are assigned ideal points on a single-issue dimension. With the aid of an endorsement, their task is to vote for the candidate whose position is closer to them. The results show that under these conditions, subjects are in fact playing a lottery, where the odds of being correct is a function of spatial location. The study points out that researchers should be aware of an “information bias” in models that use this particular information source.