Timothy J. Feddersen

Convicting the Innocent: The Inferiority of Unanimous Jury Verdicts under Strategic Voting

It is often suggested that requiring juries to reach a unanimous verdict reduces the probability of convicting an innocent defendant while increasing the probability of acquitting a guilty defendant. We construct a model that demonstrates how strategic voting by jurors undermines this basic intuition. We show that the unanimity rule may lead to a high probability of both kinds of error and that the probability of convicting an innocent defendant may actually increase with the size of the jury. Finally, we demonstrate that a wide variety of voting rules, including simple majority rule, lead to much lower probabilities of both kinds of error.

Voting behavior and information aggregation in elections with private information

The authors analyze two-candidate elections in which voters are uncertain about the realization of a state variable that affects the utility of all voters. They assume each voter has noisy private information about the state variable. The authors show that, in equilibrium, almost all voters ignore their private signal when voting. Nevertheless, elections fully aggregate information in the sense that the chosen candidate would not change if all private information were common knowledge.

Rational Choice Theory and the Paradox of Not Voting.

At least since Downs’s (1957) seminal work An Economic Theory of Democracy, rational choice theorists have appreciated the “paradox of not voting.” In a large election, the probability that an individual vote might change the election outcome is vanishingly small. If each person only votes for the purpose of influencing the election outcome, then even a small cost to vote—like a minor schedule conflict or mildly bad weather—should dissuade anyone from voting. Yet it seems that many people will put up with long lines, daunting registration requirements and even the threat of physical violence or arrest in order to vote. Given the central place of voting within political economy, the lack of an adequate rational choice model of large elections with costly voting presents an obvious problem. For the most part, theorists have bypassed the turnout problem either by eliminating voters as strategic actors or by assuming that the decision to vote is independent of other strategic choices. The problem with the first approach is that the empirical literature on voting behavior provides considerable evidence of apparently strategic behavior. In primary elections, there is evidence that voters condition their vote choice on the viability of candidates (Abramson, Aldrich, Paolino and Rohde, 1992). In a seminal and comprehensive study, Cox (1997) shows that voting patterns and election outcomes are broadly consistent with patterns of behavior predicted by strategic voting models. For example, under plurality rule (in which the candidate with the most votes wins the election),

Cohesion in Legislatures and the Vote of Confidence Procedure

W T He present a framework to analyze the effects of constitutional features on legislative voting with respect to cohesion and the distribution of payoffs. We then apply this framework to parliamentary democracies and show how a prominent feature of decision making in parliaments, the vote of confidence procedure, creates an incentive for ruling coalitions to vote together on policy issues that might otherwise split them. The key feature that creates cohesive voting is the fact that votes on bills are treated as votes on who controls floor access in future periods. As a consequence, legislative majorities capture more of the legislative rents from the minority in parliamentary democracies than in nonparliamentary settings.

Abstention in elections with asymmetric information and diverse preferences

We analyze a model of a two-candidate election in which voters have asymmetric information and diverse preferences. Voters may costlessly choose to either vote for one of the candidates or abstain. We demonstrate that a strictly positive fraction of the electorate will abstain and, nevertheless, elections effectively aggregate voters private information. The model also provides an explanation for observed patterns of participation and partisanship.

Rational Voting and Candidate Entry Under Plurality Rule

We analyze a formal model of electoral competition under plurality rule that is characterized by two novel features. First, rather than assuming a fixed field of candidates, we allow candidates to make decisions regarding entry, as well as location. Second, voters in our model are strategically rational, that is, they maximize utility over expected policy outcomes, rather than simply voting for the ideologically closest candidate. Given these assumptions, all equilibria in this model are such that the set of entrants locates at the median voters ideal point. This result stands in sharp contrast to earlier models of multicandidate competition in which entry is not allowed and voters vote sincerely.

A Voting Model Implying Duverger's Law and Positive Turnout

This paper presents a model of costly voting under plurality rule that omits parties as strategic actors and implies Duvergers Law and positive turnout. The model demonstrates that strategic voting reduces the number of parties that receive votes under plurality rule to two or less while positive costs to vote increases the number to more than one. The two assumptions taken together lead to exactly two parties receiving votes.

Moral Bias in Large Elections: Theory and Experimental Evidence

We argue that large elections may exhibit a moral bias (i.e., conditional on the distribution of preferences within the electorate, alternatives understood by voters to be morally superior are more likely to win in large elections than in small ones). This bias can result from ethical expressive preferences, which include a payoff voters obtain from taking an action they believe to be ethical. In large elections, pivot probability is small, so expressive preferences become more important relative to material self-interest. Ethical expressive preferences can have a disproportionate impact on results in large elections for two reasons. As pivot probability declines, ethical expressive motivations make agents more likely to vote on the basis of ethical considerations than on the basis of narrow self-interest, and the set of agents who choose to vote increasingly consist of agents with large ethical expressive payoffs. We provide experimental evidence that is consistent with the hypothesis of moral bias.

Deliberation and Voting Rules

We analyze a formal model of decision-making by a deliberative committee. There is a given binary agenda. Individuals evaluate the two alternatives on both private and common interest grounds. Each individual has two sorts of private information going into committee: (a) perfect information about their personal bias and (b) noisy information about which alternative is best with respect to a (commonly held) normative criterion. Prior to a committee vote to choose an alternative, committee members engage in deliberation, modeled as a simultaneous cheap-talk game. We explore and compare equilibrium properties under majority and unanimity voting rules, paying particular attention to the character of debate (who influences who and how) and quality of the decision in each instance. On balance, majority rule induces more information sharing and fewer decision-making errors than unanimity. Furthermore, the influence and character of deliberation per se can vary more under majority rule than under unanimity.

Information and Congressional Hearings

While Congressional scholars agree that hearings are an important activity there is little consensus on their role in the legislative process. The traditional literature on hearings pplays down their role as mechanisms of disseminating information because committee members often do not appear persuaded by the information they reveal. In this paper we explore the premise that hearings may not be informative to committees but may provide crucial information to the floor. We show that, if hearings have some intrinsic informative content and are costly, even extreme committees can transmit useful information to the floor. Furthermore, the possibility of holding hearings creates an incentive for extreme committees to specialize and reveal information simply by the decision whether to hold hearings.