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Helios Herrera, Ph.D.

The University of Warwick, United Kingdom

Authors: Helios Herrera, Aniol Llorente-Saguer, and Joseph C. McMurray

Abstract: Recent empirical evidence suggests that votes influence policy outcomes by contributing to electoral margins, even away from the 50% threshold. If the impact of a vote is frequent and small, rather than rare and huge, however, then the swing voter’s curse, useful for explaining patterns of voter participation, should not arise. Nevertheless, we show in this paper that this opposite voting calculus generates a new reason for abstention, to avoid the marginal voter’s curse of nudging the policy outcome in the wrong direction. Surprisingly, the marginal voter’s curse turns out to be stronger than the swing voter’s curse. In fact, in a model with both incentives, marginal considerations come to completely dominate pivotal considerations as the electorate grows large, revealing that predictions based on the standard voting calculus are knife-edge.

JEL classiffication: C72, D70

Keywords: Turnout, Information aggregation, Underdog effect

Full Text:  “The Marginal Voter’s Curse”