Compulsory versus Voluntary Voting Mechanisms : An Experimental Study ∗

This paper uses laboratory experiments to study the impact of voting mechanism on voter participation and on the sincerity of voting decisions. Under jury decision-making setups in which individuals have the common value but noisy private information regarding the true states of nature, two voting mechanisms are studied: (1) compulsory voting, where individual voters are required to vote, and (2) voluntary voting, where voters may choose to vote or to abstain. The theoretical literature predicts that under compulsory voting, rational voters have an incentive to vote strategically, against their private information regarding the true states of nature, but that under voluntary voting, voters would rationally follow their private information (i.e. vote sincerely) with endogenously determined participation rates. We propose to test the theory of voting mechanisms in the lab by controlling voting institutions and individual costs of voting. ∗This paper is preliminary and includes only the results from a pilot session. †Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh. Email: sourav@pitt.edu ‡Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh. Email: jduffy@pitt.edu §Department of Economics, University of Pittsburgh. Email: suk36@pitt.edu