I investigate the welfare properties of a broad class of electoral systems with endogenous turnout. I find that the welfare ranking of electoral systems depends on the composition of the electorate. If citizens have identical voting costs, then all electoral systems that satisfy certain...

Which decision rule should we use to make a binary collective choice? While voting procedures are applied ubiquitously, they are criticized for being inefficient. Using monetary transfers, efficient choices can be made at the cost of a budget imbalance. Is it optimal to do so? And why are...

Majority rule is known to be at odds with utilitarianism --- majority rule follows the preferences of the median voter whereas a utilitarian planner would follow the preferences of the mean voter. In this paper, we show that when voting is costly and voluntary, turnout endogenously adjusts so...