Voter turnout and elections

YouNotSneaky! argues that it is not necesary to have a higher turn out in elections to get an accurate reflection of the collective social choice. It is even claimed that a higher turnout imposes higher social costs, without commensurate benefits. Using the Law of Large Numbers and Central Limit Theorem, he infers that in an election involving a large electorate, a 10% or 15% turnout would be sufficient to elicit a more or less accurate verdict.

It can be safely surmised that those with strong views and specific positions on issues are more likely to vote, and it would seem only appropriate that this be the case. In contrast, those indifferent to the outcome are likely to stay back, which again seems appropriate enough. Therefore the arguement that voting is a public good and those staying away free-ride on the back of those who vote, would appear to be inaccurate.

Ironically enough, another way to get an accurate voting outcome is to charge the committed voters a specific voting fee, while letting the others vote for free. If a fee is a charged, only those committed to specific causes will pay up for exercising franchise.

Alan S. Gerber, Donald P. Green, and Christopher W. Larimer did a large-scale field experiment involving several hundred thousand registered voters to test the influence of of social pressure as an inducement to political participation. They send out letters telling people whether they and their neighbors have voted in past elections and promising to send a followup letter after the election. The unsubtle message is: voting records are public information, and if you don't vote this year your neighbors will know about it. It was observed that the turnout among those who got the letters was a whopping 8.1 percentage points higher than the control group.

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler feel that voters can be "nudged" into voting by asking specific questions about whether they intend to vote or not a few days before the elections. There is another interesting article in the NBER by Aaron Edlin, Andrew Gelman and Noah Kaplan, Voting as a rational choice: Why and how people vote to improve the well-being of others