Voter Turnout and Political Rents

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jpet.12141
• Author: GANI ALDASHEV
• Published date: 01 August 2015
• Date: 01 August 2015

VOTER TURNOUT AND POLITICAL RENTS

GANI ALDASHEV

THEMA, University of Cergy-Pontoise, and CRED, University of Namur

Abstract

Is the decline in voter turnout an indicator of a worse

health of a representative democracy? We build a simple

probabilistic-voting model with endogenous turnout to ad-

dress this question. We find that a lower turnout caused by a

higher cost of voting implies higher political rents. Contrar-

ily, a lower turnout caused by a higher ideological mobility

of voters or by a lower expressive benefit of voting implies

lower political rents. If voters have a civic-duty motive to vote

that depends on the level of rents, multiple equilibria (a

high-rents low-turnout and a low-rents high-turnout) arise.

1. Introduction

A fundamental problem of a representative democracy is the possibility

for elected politicians to divert a part of tax revenues toward their private

consumption, and thus against the interests of voters at large. In political

economy literature, this activity bears the name of “political rent extraction.”

Extensive research has addressed, both empirically and theoretically, the

determinants of political rents (see Aidt 2003; Besley 2006; and Pande 2007

for detailed surveys).

On the other hand, one of the reasons of alarm about declining voter

turnout in most OECD countries has been the consideration that this secular

trend might indicate lower trust of citizens in the political system (Levi and

Stocker 2000) and signal a weaker health of the democratic system overall

(Pharr, Putnam, and Dalton 2000).

Gani Aldashev, THEMA, University of Cergy-Pontoise and CRED, University of Namur

(gani.aldashev@u-cergy.fr).

I thank two anonymous referees, Jean-Marie Baland, Tim Besley, Bruno Frey, Raphael

Godefroy, Nicolas Sahuguet, Guido Tabellini, and participants at the RES Easter School

(Birmingham), Public Choice Meeting (Baltimore), European Public Choice Meeting

(Berlin), GEEP Workshop at HEC-Montreal, and seminars at London School of Eco-

nomics, University of Namur, and University of Aix-Marseille for useful comments.

Received October 5, 2014; Accepted November 1, 2014.

C2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Journal of Public Economic Theory, 17 (4), 2015, pp. 528–552.

528

Voter Turnout and Political Rents 529

However, lower turnout may not only be a consequence of higher politi-

cal rents (and thus lower trust in government), but one of its causes. Clearly,

when fewer voters act as supervisors of the performance of politicians in

office, the rent-maximizing politicians might have a stronger incentive to

misbehave.

Despite the plausibility of this hypothesis, no research has addressed it

formally. The goal of this paper is thus to analyze the link between turnout

and political rent extraction. We want to answer the following questions:

What is the mechanism through which turnout and political rents are re-

lated? Is declining turnout a sign of poor health of the democratic system?

What political-economic outcomes obtain when variations in turnout affect

rents and this, in turn, might influence turnout?

To answer these questions, we build a simple probabilistic-voting model

of two-candidate electoral competition with endogenous voter turnout. A

citizen’s decision to vote is probabilistically determined by her expressive

benefit (which increases with the strength of her ideological preference on

the left-right scale). Factors that affect turnout influence asymmetrically the

probability of participation of ideologically neutral and ideologically moti-

vated citizens. Changes in these factors influence the intensity of electoral

competition which, in turn, determines equilibrium political rents. We find

that a lower turnout resulting from a higher ideological homogeneity of vot-

ers or a lower expressive benefit of voting leads to lower equilibrium political

rents. Contrarily, a lower turnout that is caused by a higher voting cost (e.g.,

the opportunity cost of time) leads to higher equilibrium political rents.

We then extend our model by adding the civic duty benefit of voting

that depends on the level of political rents. In this extension, voter turnout

and political rents are jointly determined. We find that multiple equilibria

can emerge. One stable equilibrium is the situation in which candidates an-

nounce high rents, which discourage voters from participating in elections

and thus weaken the electoral competition, and this confirms the incentive

of the candidates to announce high rents. The other stable equilibrium is

the situation in which candidates choose low rents, which encourages voters

(in particular, ideologically neutral voters) to turn out and thus intensifies

the electoral competition, and this confirms the incentive of the candidates

to announce low rents.

From the methodological point of view, to the best of our knowledge,

ours is the first paper that integrates endogenous voter turnout in a model

that attempts to explain the discipline of elected politicians. Most research

regarding voter turnout can be classified as belonging to two large groups.

The first group aims at explaining the facts related to turnout differences

(see, for example, Dhillon and Peralta (2002) and Feddersen (2004) for

excellent surveys). The second group (e.g., Ledyard 1984; Morton 1987;

Anderson and Glomm 1992; Adams and Merrill 2003; Llavador 2006;

Hortala-Vallve and Esteve-Volart 2011a) builds and tests spatial models of

electoral competition with rational instrumentally motivated voters that