Abstract
For all the attention that levels of turnout receive in the game-theoretic literature, a case can be made that the most important problem in this regard is not the level of turnout but its bias. In principle, if every segment of the populace voted at the same rates, we could say that the lower the turnout the better; we could obtain the same degree of representation with a cheaper electoral exercise. But in reality this is not the case. There is massive evidence that, in country after country, electoral participation is biased so that those citizens at the top of the socioeconomic ladder vote at higher rates than the rest (Lijphart 1997).
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Notes
- 1.
Although a full discussion would take us too far from our central topic, the reader must keep in mind that generically games have an odd number of equilibria. This explains why I do not consider the case of two fixed points.
- 2.
The central role of trade-offs across constituencies places this model in close proximity to the classic analysis of the dilemma of left-wing parties in Europe by Przeworski and Sprague (1986). The clearest difference is, of course, that in their analysis the turnout decisions of the citizens were not explicitly modeled.
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Medina Sierra, L.F. (2018). Electoral Participation Bias and the Welfare State. In: Beyond the Turnout Paradox. SpringerBriefs in Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73948-9_4
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