Date of Award
2025
Document Type
Honors Thesis (Open Access)
Department
Colby College. Economics Dept.
Advisor(s)
Erin Giffin
Second Advisor
Sanval Nasim
Abstract
A variety of factors influence the decision to participate in a democratic election or not. This paper explores one of these factors: an individual’s perceived pivotality. I explore how people assess the value of their vote when they are informed about the likelihood that their vote will be pivotal. To do so, I conduct an online voting experiment where subjects participate in three different stylized elections: a marginal election, a landslide election, and an uninformed election (where the voter distribution is unclear to participants). I elicit participants’ vote valuations and compare them across election conditions and demographic groups using both mean and distributional measures. Results from the experiment indicate that participants as a whole value their vote more in marginal elections than in landslide elections. I also examine heterogeneous treatment effects by gender and race. In an election where the electorate distribution was unknown, men valued their vote as if they were in a marginal election, while women valued their vote as if they were in a landslide election. When uninformed about the electorate distribution, men behave as if their votes will be pivotal, while women behave as if their votes will not be pivotal. Heterogeneous treatment effects by race are inconclusive due to a small sample size, but preliminary results suggest similar differences to those of men and women.
Keywords
Economics, Behavioral Economics, Voting, Voting Behavior
Recommended Citation
Sickinger, Nicholas J., "The Value of a Vote: Vote Pivotality Information and Its Impact on Voter Willingness to Accept" (2025). Honors Theses. Paper 1489.https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/1489
