We exploit a voting reform in France to estimate the causal effect of exit poll information on turnout and bandwagon voting. Before the change in legislation, individuals in some French overseas territories voted after the election result had already been made public via exit poll information from mainland France. We estimate that knowing the exit poll information decreases voter turnout by abo...

In the time since the rise of the Internet, it has often been claimed that it has the potential to contribute to the quality of democracy by fostering citizens’ involvement in politics. So far, empirical evidence regarding this purported effect has been mixed, and many questions about the consequences of specific forms of political Internet use (PIU) have remained unanswered. This study expands...

Prior to the November 6, 2001 elections, randomized voter mobilization experiments were conducted in Bridgeport, Columbus, Detroit, Minneapolis, Raleigh, and St. Paul. Names appearing on official lists of registered voters were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. A few days before Election Day, the treatment group received a face-to-face contact from a coalition of nonpartisan st...

Bendor, Diermeier, and Ting (2003) develop a behavioral alternative to rational choice models of turnout. However, the assumption they make about the way individuals adjust their probability of voting biases their model towards their main result of significant turnout in large populations. Moreover, the assumption causes individuals to engage in casual voting (sometimes people vote and sometime...

Despite dramatic increases in available political information through cable television and the Internet, political knowledge and turnout have not changed noticeably. To explain this seeming paradox, I argue that greater media choice makes it easier for people to find their preferred content. People who like news take advantage of abundant political information to become more knowledgeable and m...

We study the allocation of investment projects by municipal governments across groups of voters using data from a scal stimulus program carried out in Spain between 2009 and 2011. This program provided municipalities with a large endowment to spend in public investments and required the geocoding of each individual project. Combining these data with disaggregated election information at the cen...

This paper documents the impact of voter turnout on top marginal tax rates in the 34 OECD countries for the period between 1974 and 2014. Across a number of specifications, I find that increases in voter turnout have a positive and statistically significant effect on top tax rates. This finding is broadly consistent with the median voter theorem that posits government redistribution to be a fun...

We study a model of costly voting over two alternatives, where agents’ preferences are determined by both (i) a private preference in favour of one alternative e.g. candidates’ policies, and (ii) heterogeneous information in the form of noisy signals about a commonly valued state of the world e.g. candidate competence. We show that depending on the level of the personal bias (weight on private ...

erious allegations of fraud have been made with respect to Russia’s first competitive, party-based parliamentary election in December 1993. Although similar allegations have been made with respect to the 1995 parliamentary and 1996 presidential elections, those that concern 1993 are especially problematic. The assertion that over nine million ballots were fraudulently cast and that the turnout ...

An ongoing debate in political psychology is about whether small wording differences have outsized behavioral effects. A leading example is whether subtle linguistic cues embedded in voter mobilization messages dramatically increase turnout. An initial study analyzing two small-scale field experiments argued that describing someone as a voter (noun) instead of one who votes (verb) increases tur...