Direct survey measures of turnout often suffer from misreporting, particularly among non-voters. We investigate whether misreporting in online surveys can be reduced by two new question designs aimed at strengthening or buffering respondent's self-integrity against the perceived psychological threat admitting non-voting. Drawing on evidence experiments embedded vote validated after 2016 UK EU R...

This paper studies how voter turnout affects the extent to which voter preferences are aggregated in elections. Given that voting is costly, election outcomes disproportionately aggregate the preferences of voters with low voting cost. We show that the correlation structure among preferences, costs, and perception of voting effi cacy can be identified, and explore how the correlation affects pr...

In this paper we propose two mechanisms that can be used as a solution to low participation levels in PR elections. The first tool we propose is an electoral rule where the number of candidates elected depends on the level of participation. The second tool we propose is a participation quorum that has to be met in order for the election to be valid. In both cases we characterize all possible eq...

Why do people turn out to vote? By requiring coordination and by generating positive externalities on others while involving a private cost, turning out to vote resembles a public good contribution and is therefore subject to collective action problems. While this has been established theoretically, the empirical evidence is fraught with measurement and identification problems. We investigate w...

Political scientists are making increasing use of the methodologies of behavior genetics in an attempt to uncover whether or not political behavior is heritable, as well as the specific genotypes that might act as predisposing factors for—or predictors of—political “phenotypes.” Noteworthy among the latter are a series of candidate gene association studies in which researchers claim to have dis...