Vincent Pons

Voting Rules, Turnout, and Economic Policies In recent years, voter ID laws and convenience voting have generated heated partisan debates. To shed light on these policy issues, we survey the evidence on the institutional determinants and effects...

Full paper here: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

And here: www.vincentpons.org/voting-rules (n/n).

d/ understanding why voter turnout has declined in many countries in recent decades even though barriers to voting have generally come down. One explanation is a weakening sense of civic duty, calling for research on the reasons explaining the erosion of the civic norm and possible remedies (16/n).

b/ studying how voting procedures are implemented in practice and the effects of election administration quality on voter turnout

c/ investigating how being an active voter affects other individual outcomes, such as accepting election outcomes or seeking political information (15/n)

Finally, we highlighting questions for future research:

a/ measuring the effects of election rules that have not changed much over time and that tend to vary at the national level—such as holding elections on Tuesdays in the United States (14/n)

These rules operate mostly through benefits, for instance by affecting the number and types of candidates as well as electoral competitiveness. As a result, they can be just as crucial for political participation as voting procedures (13/n).

Fourth, we examine the turnout effect of rules that, before the election, govern redistricting, primaries, candidacy requirements, and campaigns, as well as the effect of rules that determine how the votes cast map onto a set of election winners (e.g., plurality voting versus PR) (12/n).

We also discuss the (exaggerated) tension between combating voter fraud and facilitating voter participation and review cross-country evidence on the large effects of compulsory voting (11/n).

Convenience voting laws still require voters to go over some hurdles, perhaps explaining why they increase participation less than same-day registration or automatic registration (10/n).

Voter registration barriers—which occur before the election, when the stakes are not salient—have particularly large effects. The act of voting itself is generally less costly, particularly when people can choose between alternative ways to vote (9/n).

Third, we use this framework to analyze which voting procedures matter most for voter turnout. Voting procedures create obstacles so they primarily affect the cost of participation (8/n).

However, these benefits are modest, so any administrative obstacle to voting can disenfranchise many voters (7/n).

Second, we highlight that voting rules may affect participation by altering either its benefits or its costs. Voters’ belief that their vote matters and social image considerations explain why people vote despite the minuscule probability that their vote will be pivotal (6/n).

We note that, contrasting with evidence that voting law reforms which enfranchised large swathes of the population like the 1965 Voting Rights Act had important consequences for policy making, we know little about the policy impact of smaller reforms (5/n).

We first document the decline in turnout in many countries since the 1980s and discuss the importance of strong and equal participation for the legitimacy of elected officials and the representativeness of electoral outcomes and policy choices (4/n).

To shed light on these issues, we survey around 150 papers in economics and political science on the institutional determinants and effects of voter turnout and broaden the perspective beyond the most debated rules (3/n).

In recent years, voter ID laws and convenience voting have generated heated partisan debates. US states have enacted many changes to voting rules, including strict ID laws, early voting and automatic voter registration. Similar reforms have taken place in other countries (2/n).

Voting Rules, Turnout, and Economic Policies In recent years, voter ID laws and convenience voting have generated heated partisan debates. To shed light on these policy issues, we survey the evidence on the institutional determinants and effects...

Very happy to share our paper “Voting Rules, Turnout, and Economic Policies,” published in the Annual Review of Economics!

Full paper here: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Short 🧵on main take-aways below.

w/ E. Cantoni and J. Schafer
#EconSky #PoliSciSky @annualreviews.bsky.social (1/n).

Comment Trump peut-il régner de façon aussi absolue ?
Ma dernière chronique pour @lesechosfr.bsky.social 👇👇

Thanks for reading!

This talk is partly based on my Harvard PhD course with Jesse Shapiro. Syllabus: www.vincentpons.org/syllabus-pee... (n/n).

Schönenberger shows that narrowly ousted incumbents who are freed from reelection concerns shift to more extreme positions after elections, during the lame-duck session (21/n).

I finally mention @fsberger.bsky.social 's very nice jmp: “Out of Office, Out of Step? Re-election Concerns and Ideological Shirking in Lame Duck Sessions of the U.S. House of Representatives” (20/n).

National Elections Database The National Elections Database provides detailed national election results for parliamentary and presidential elections worldwide from 1789 to 2023. The version 1.0 of this dataset was first built to...

We made our data accessible at www.nationalelectionsdatabase.com: the National Elections Database (Version 2.0) (19/n).

Our interpretation for the positive effects of turnovers is that leaders in their first term exert more effort. Indeed, in later terms, voters already have a lot of information and have formed precise beliefs about the incumbent’s type, so incumbent can only move the needle a bit (18/n).

The third is my paper with Marx and @vincent-rollet.bsky.social, “Electoral Turnovers” (ReStud).
We ask whether electoral turnovers improve performance using a cross-country RDD on 4k presidential and parliamentary elections since 1945 (17/n).

The second is “Populist Leaders and the Economy” (AER) by Funke, @schularick.bsky.social and Trebesch who study the economic effects of 51 populist governments using the synthetic control method (16/n).

The first is “Partisan Shocks and Financial Markets: Evidence from Close National Elections” (AEJ: Applied) by @dgirardi.bsky.social. Using a cross-country RDD, Girardi finds that left-wing electoral victories cause large short-term decreases in stock market valuation (15/n).

Until recently, much of the evidence on these effects was at the subnational level and within country. I discuss three papers using novel cross-country evidence on the effects of national election outcomes (presidential and parliamentary elections), which are likely more consequential (14/n).

In the second part of the talk, I discuss recent work on the economic effects of elections through two main forces, representation and agency (13/n).

I conclude this first part by mentioning additional data sources to study voter and candidate behavior (12/n).

Overall, how strategic are voters and candidates/parties, based on these new results? Does Adam Smith’s invisible hand apply to elections? (11/n)