Cost-conscious voters in referendum elections

Are Voters Rational? Evidence from Gubernatorial Elections

Standard agency theory suggests that rational voters will vote to re-elect politicians who deliver favorable outcomes. A second implication is that rational voters will not support a politician because of good outcomes unrelated to the politician’s actions. Specifically, rational voters should try to filter signal from noise, both in order to avoid electing incompetent, but lucky politicians, a...

The Effect of Partisan Information On Voters in Nonpartisan Elections

Frequent Manipulability of Elections: The Case of Two Voters

The recent result of Friedgut, Kalai and Nisan [9] gives a quantitative version of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem regarding manipulation in elections, but holds only for neutral social choice functions and three alternatives. We complement their theorem by proving a similar result regarding Pareto-Optimal social choice functions when the number of voters is two. We discuss the implications o...

Elections with Few Voters: Candidate Control Can Be Easy

We study the computational complexity of candidate control in elections with few voters, that is, we consider the parameterized complexity of candidate control in elections with respect to the number of voters as a parameter. We consider both the standard scenario of adding and deleting candidates, where one asks whether a given candidate can become a winner (or, in the destructive case, can be...

Decentralization and Accountability: Are Voters More Vigilant in Local than in National Elections?

This paper compares voter behavior in local and national elections to make inferences about whether voters are more vigilant in monitoring the more local level of government. Vigilance is defined as retrospective voting where voters evaluate incumbents based on their overall performance during the entire term in office. We contrast voter behavior in state legislative assembly elections in India...