Turnout Across Democracies / Helios Herrera, Massimo Morelli, Salvatore Nunnari.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Herrera, Helios.

Contributor:

National Bureau of Economic Research.

Morelli, Massimo.

Nunnari, Salvatore.

Series:

Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w20451.

NBER working paper series no. w20451

Language:

English

Physical Description:

1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2014.

Summary:

World democracies widely differ in electoral rules, as well as in legislative, executive or legal institutions. Different institutional environments induce different mappings from electoral outcomes to the distribution of power. We explore how these mappings affect voters' participation to an election. We show that the effect of such institutional differences on turnout depends on the distribution of voters' preferences for the competing parties. In particular, we uncover a novel contest effect: given the distribution of preferences, turnout increases and then decreases when we move from a more proportional to a less proportional system; turnout is maximized for an intermediate degree of proportionality. Moreover, we generalize the competition effect, common to models of endogenous turnout: given the institutional environment, turnout increases in the ex-ante closeness of the election and peaks when the population is evenly split between the two parties. These results are robust to a wide range of modeling approaches, including ethical voter models, voter mobilization models, and rational voter models.

Notes:

Print version record

September 2014.