Voter Turnout with Peer Punishment
David K. Levine, Andrea Mattozzi
American Economic Review · 2020 · Volume 110 · Issue 10
Abstract
We introduce a model where social norms of voting participation are strategically chosen by competing political parties and determine voters' turnout. Social norms must be enforced through costly peer monitoring and punishment. When the cost of enforcement of social norms is low, the larger party is always advantaged. Otherwise, in the spirit of Olson (1965), the smaller party may be advantaged. Our model shares features of the ethical voter model and it delivers novel and empirically relevant comparative statics results.
Keywords
Political Processes: Rent-seeking, Lobbying, Elections, Legislatures, and Voting Behavior, Economic Sociology, Economic Anthropology, Language, Social and Economic Stratification
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