This paper starts from four observations: (1) voter turnout is declining in established democracies; (2) low turnout means socio-economically unequal turnout; (3) compulsory voting is an effective means to increase turnout; (4) even low-turnout countries, however, have neither introduced nor even contemplated a legal obligation to vote. A closer look at the arguments against compulsory voting s...

Incumbent malfeasance is a major challenge in many developing democracies. Our model suggests that electoral accountability requires a media market structure incentivizing local media to report incumbent malfeasance. We test the model’s implications in Mexico, leveraging plausibly exogenous variation in the pre-election release of municipal audits revealing misallocated spending and greater acc...

We set up a model of elections or referendums with two alternatives to study how voter turnout and election outcomes are a¤ected by the publication of exit polls on election day. We …nd that the introduction of an exit poll in‡uences the incentive to vote both before and after the poll is published, but the sign of the e¤ect is generally ambiguous. The fact that exit polls in‡uence the incentiv...

The fact that many citizens fail to vote is often cited to motivate others to vote. Psychological research on descriptive social norms suggests that emphasizing the opposite—that many do vote—would be a more effective message. In two get-out-the-vote field experiments, we find that messages emphasizing low expected turnout are less effective at motivating voters than messages emphasizing high e...

A conclave is a voting mechanism in which a committee selects an alternative by voting until a su cient supermajority is reached. We study experimentally welfare properties of simple three-voter conclaves with privately known preferences over two outcomes and waiting costs. The resulting game is a form of multiplayer war of attrition. Our key nding is that, consistent with theoretical predictio...

Using a natural voting experiment in Switzerland that encompasses a 160-year period (1848–2009), we investigate whether a higher level of complexity leads to increased reliance on expert knowledge. We find that when more referenda are held on the same day, constituents are more likely to refer to parliamentary recommendations in making their decisions. This finding holds true even when we narro...

The present paper studies the Hotelling-Downs and the Wittman-Roemer models of two-party competition when voter conformism is present and the policy space is uni-dimensional. We consider two types of voter conformism, bandwagon and underdog, and study their effects on political equilibrium of the two models. Even if voter conformism is present, the Hotelling-Downs parties propose an identical p...

In this paper we present an extension of the Prêt à Voter e-voting system that introduces visual encryption to solve the chain voting problem and ensures that no organisation sees the layout of the ballot form prior to its use. The chain voting problem in Prêt à Voter is that anyone who can see the ballot prior to its use can coerce a voter by noting down the details of the form and then requir...

The recently proposed Prêt à Voter election scheme uses decryption mixes to achieve anonymity of votes and verifiability of an election while requiring minimal trust in the component of the election system that performs these mixes. However, this scheme still requires trust in several human and machine components; these requirements make the scheme impractical for use in remote voting. To adapt...

The goal of this dissertation is to aid our understanding of how electoral institutions in the United States affect political participation and, in turn, shape policy outcomes. I investigate this relationship by analyzing the all-mail balloting method known as Vote By Mail. Using a data set of 3310 cases representing elections in 7 states, I show that the use of Vote By Mail produces an overall...