This paper investigates how information affect voting behaviour. There exist a large literature suggesting that uninformed voters can use informational shortcuts or cues to vote as if they were informed. This paper tests this hypothesis using unique Swedish individual survey data on the...

Although Australian political pundits frequently make predictions about the future, little systematic evidence exists on the accuracy of these predictions. To assess the predictive power of experts, we survey the transcripts of two well-known political programs - Insiders and Meet the Press -...

This paper investigates how information affect voting behaviour. There exist a large literature suggesting that uninformed voters can use informational shortcuts or cues to vote as if they were informed. This paper tests this hypothesis using unique Swedish individual survey data on the...

Public choice theory takes citizens as rationally ignorant about political issues, because the costs of being informed greatly exceed the utility individuals derive from it. The costs of information (supply side) as well as the utility of information (demand side), however, can vary...

Using nearly one million images from the front page of news websites during the 2016 election period, I show how computer vision techniques can identify the faces of politicians across the images and measure the nonverbal emotional content expressed on each face. I find strong evidence for...

I conduct an experiment to assess whether majority voting on a nonbinding sharing norm affects subsequent behavior in a dictator game. In a baseline treatment, subjects play a one shot dictator game. In a voting treatment, subjects are first placed behind a 'veil of ignorance' and vote on the...

This paper uses the unique social structure of Arab communities to examine the effect of social identity on voter turnout. We first show that voters are more likely to vote for a candidate who shares their social group (signified by last name) as compared to other candidates. Using last name as...

Numerous studies have found a negative relationship between the closeness of an election, the size of the electorate and voter turnout. It is often claimed that this relationship supports the rational voter hypothesis, with closeness and size proxying for the decisiveness of a vote. We offer a...

The rational-voter model is often criticized on the grounds that two of its central predictions (the paradox of voting and Duverger's Law) are at odds with reality. Recent theoretical advances suggest that these empirically unsound predictions might be an artifact of an (arguably unrealistic)...

This paper reconsiders the classical problem of majority voting over tax schedules, adding the possibility to avoid taxes. In this setting preferences over tax schedules are not determined by earned income, but rather by taxable income, which depends on the joint decisions of labor supply and...