Published January 1987
| public
Journal Article
The Downsian model of electoral participation: Formal theory and empirical analysis of the constituency size effect
Abstract
This paper applies a game-theoretic model of participation under uncertainty to investigate the negative relationship between constituency size and voter turnout rates: theconstituency size effect. We find that this theoretical model accounts for almost all of the variation in turnout due to size in cross sectional data from school budget referenda.
Additional Information
Copyright 1987 Martinus Nijhoff Publishers. Copyright of Public Choice is the property of Springer Science & Business Media B.V. This work has benefitted from comments made at presentations at the political economy seminars at Carnegie-Mellon, Pennsylvania, and Stanford and at the Weingart Conference on Formal Models of Voting at Caltech. In particular, we thank Robert Inman and Douglas Rivers for independently pointing out that multiple equilibria posed a problem for maximum likelihood estimation and Rivers for simplifying the derivation of the likelihood function. We also thank the referee for useful comments.Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 65024
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- CaltechAUTHORS:20160303-114737153
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