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The Swing Voter's Curse
TLDR
In this article, the existence of a swing voter's curse is demonstrated: less informed indifferent voters strictly prefer to abstain rather than vote for either candidate even when voting is costless, and the equilibrium result that a substantial fraction of the electorate will abstain even though all abstainers strictly prefer voting for one candidate over voting for another.Abstract:
The authors analyze two-candidate elections in which some voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters. They demonstrate the existence of a swing voter's curse: less informed indifferent voters strictly prefer to abstain rather than vote for either candidate even when voting is costless. The swing voter's curse leads to the equilibrium result that a substantial fraction of the electorate will abstain even though all abstainers strictly prefer voting for one candidate over voting for another. Copyright 1996 by American Economic Association.read more
Citations
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Information Aggregation, Rationality, and the Condorcet Jury Theorem
TL;DR: The Condorcet Jury Theorem states that majorities are more likely than any single individual to select the "better" of two alternatives when there exists uncertainty about which of the two alternatives is in fact preferred as discussed by the authors.
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Does education improve citizenship? Evidence from the United States and the United Kingdom
TL;DR: The authors explored the effect of extra schooling induced through compulsory schooling laws on the likelihood of becoming politically involved in the United States and the United Kingdom, finding that educational attainment is related to several measures of political interest and involvement in both countries.
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Convicting the Innocent: The Inferiority of Unanimous Jury Verdicts under Strategic Voting
TL;DR: The authors showed that the probability of acquitting an innocent defendant may actually increase with the size of the jury and that a wide variety of voting rules, including simple majority rule, lead to much lower probabilities of both kinds of error.
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Bayesian Learning in Social Networks
TL;DR: The main theorem shows that when the probability that each individual observes some other individual from the recent past converges to one as the social network becomes large, unbounded private beliefs are sufficient to ensure asymptotic learning.
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Television and Voter Turnout
TL;DR: This paper showed that substitution away from other media with more political coverage provides a plausible mechanism linking television to voting, and that the entry of television in a market coincided with sharp drops in consumption of newspapers and radio, and in political knowledge as measured by election surveys.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
A theory of auctions and competitive bidding
Paul Milgrom,Robert J. Weber +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, a new general auction model was proposed, and the properties of affiliated random variables were investigated, and various theorems were presented in Section 4-8 and Section 9.
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A Theory of the Calculus of Voting
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors reinterpret the voting calculus so that it can fit comfortably into a rationalistic theory of political behavior and present empirical evidence that citizens actually behave as if they employed this calculus.
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Rational Choice and Turnout
TL;DR: Turnout, however, presents a special problem for rational choice theories of politics, for it is taken to be the paradigmatic example of the problem of collective action in which, although all may benefit from voting, it is rarely in the individual's self-interest to vote as discussed by the authors.
Journal ArticleDOI
Information Aggregation, Rationality, and the Condorcet Jury Theorem
TL;DR: The Condorcet Jury Theorem states that majorities are more likely than any single individual to select the "better" of two alternatives when there exists uncertainty about which of the two alternatives is in fact preferred as discussed by the authors.
Condorcet's theory of voting
TL;DR: Condorcet resolut ce probleme en utilisant une forme d'estimation par le maximum de vraisemblance, a procedure qu'il en a tiree peut aussi etre justifiee a partir d'une perspective axiomatique moderne as mentioned in this paper.