publications
2023
- JEPSDiscussion and Fairness in a Laboratory Voting ExperimentJonathan Woon, Minsu Jang, Kira Pronin, and 1 more authorJournal of Experimental Political Science, 2023
We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether public discussion before a majority vote increases the saliency of minority interests and results in more egalitarian outcomes or whether voters use discussion to form majorities that benefit at the expense of minorities. When there are two alternatives, we find that public discussion increases the likelihood that individuals vote for equal allocations, but has little to no impact on the group outcomes. When participants choose among one equal and several unequal options, the multitude of unequal options creates a coordination problem, and we find that discussion decreases the frequency of egalitarian decisions. Our findings suggest that the effect of public communication on the fairness of majority voting outcomes depends on the strategic environment.
- SCWDoes allowing private communication lead to less prosocial collective choice?Kira Pronin, and Jonathan WoonSocial Choice and Welfare, 2023
To investigate the effects of private communication on support for prosocial collective choices, we conduct a laboratory experiment in a public goods setting with a majority vote, manipulating whether participants can have private conversations before a public discussion. When private conversations are allowed, majority tyranny outcomes are more common and prosocial collective choices less common. In both communication treatments, participants start out proposing and voting for prosocial allocations and increase their support for majority tyranny allocations as the experiment progresses. Private communication therefore increases the prevalence of majority tyranny (but is not strictly necessary for it). The results demonstrate that the effects of private communication in multilateral bargaining extend to public goods settings, despite the contrasting finding in the latter that democratic institutions enhance prosocial outcomes.
- R&PElectability salience can bias voting decisionsWilliam Minozzi, and Jonathan WoonResearch & Politics, 2023
“Electability” received considerable attention during the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, with some critics claiming that the term was code for sexism. From a rational choice perspective, “electability” could affect voting in multiple ways, including via expected utility; previous scholarship suggests that many voters consider it as such. Yet this scholarship ignores the role that salience plays in decision making, and is silent on which sorts of candidate might benefit from the effects of priming electability. To address these issues, we conducted a survey experiment during the 2020 primary season, measuring Democratic primary voters’ preferences for candidates, electability estimates, and candidate rankings. Our experiment manipulated salience by randomizing the order in which preferences and electability were elicited. We show that electability salience caused a substantial increase in the probability that a respondent made decisions based only on electability.
2022
- JEcPsyOnline belief elicitation methodsValeria Burdea, and Jonathan WoonJournal of Economic Psychology, 2022
How well do incentivized belief elicitation procedures work in online settings? We evaluate the quality of beliefs elicited from online respondents, comparing several characteristics of two widely used complex elicitation mechanisms (the Binarized Scoring Rule – BSR – and a stochastic variation of the Becker–deGroot–Marschak mechanism—BDM) against a flat fee baseline for a variety of beliefs (induced probabilities, first-order factual knowledge, second-order knowledge of others). We find that the flat-fee method requires the least amount of time, the BDM is the most difficult to understand, and that there are no differences in the average accuracy of induced beliefs across conditions. However, the methods are significantly different in terms of the frequency of first-order and second-order beliefs reported at exactly 50%: the flat-fee method leads to the most mass on this belief, followed by BDM and BSR. Regarding induced beliefs, we also find that less-educated participants’ accuracy is higher in the complex incentives treatments, and that attention, numeracy, and education are positively associated with the quality of these beliefs across methods. Our results suggest that the quality of beliefs elicited in online environments may depend less on the formal incentive compatibility properties of the elicitation procedure (whether the procedure prevents “dishonest” reporting) than on the difficulty of comprehending the task and how well incentives induce cognitive effort (thereby inducing subjects to quantify or construct their beliefs).
2020
- PSTrump Is Not a (Condorcet) Loser! Primary Voters’ Preferences and the 2016 Republican Presidential NominationJonathan Woon, Sean Craig, Amanda Leifson, and 1 more authorPS: Political Science & Politics, 2020
Many commentators argued that if elites and voters had coordinated on an alternative candidate, Donald Trump could have been defeated for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. This claim rests on the implicit assumption that Trump would have been defeated in a head-to-head contest against another candidate—that he was a Condorcet loser. Conventional pre-election polls, however, do not provide enough information about voters’ preferences to assess the plausibility of this claim. Relying on novel data to construct individuals’ complete preferences over the set of leading Republican candidates, we find that no other candidate strictly defeats Trump in pairwise majority-rule comparisons and—far from being a Condorcet loser—that Trump is a member of the majority-rule core. Our results question the plausibility of the coordination narrative because Trump’s support was wider than political observers believed: it came from a broad base of the Republican primary electorate rather than a small but intense minority.
- JEBOTime and punishment: Blame and concession in political standoffsIan Palmer Cook, and Jonathan WoonJournal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2020
Political negotiation frequently looks like two sides staring each other down, waiting for the other to blink. In these showdowns, neither side wishes to concede, claiming that doing so would incur the wrath of voters. Whether this consideration of potential punishment influences behavior during stalemates is not well understood, and little theory or evidence exists to explain how voters allocate blame for different outcomes. We conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate two interrelated questions: how does anticipation of blame drive behavior, and how do observers with a stake in the outcome allocate blame? In our experiment, we adopt a dynamic war of attrition to model a negotiating situation in which concession time is the key choice variable, and our design compares versions of the game with and without an observer (whose payoffs depend on the outcome and who can punish the players). We find that the presence of the observer shortens the duration of standoffs and leads to outcomes that favor the observer. We also find that observers tend to punish the winning player and that the level of punishment depends on the alignment between the observer and players. The experimental data are qualitatively consistent with instrumental punishment, but the magnitude tends to be less than optimal, possibly reflecting subjects’ behavioral or emotional responses.
- JBEEDirect response and the strategy method in an experimental cheap talk gameWilliam Minozzi, and Jonathan WoonJournal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics, 2020
In cheap talk games, equilibrium analysis predicts extreme limits on the information that can be transmitted when senders and receivers have different goals. Yet experimental evidence suggests that senders overcommunicate relative to this baseline, revealing more information than predicted in equilibrium. We propose that overcommunication may be due in part to limited cognitive engagement by subjects, captured by level-k thinking. To test this conjecture, we compare two elicitation methods, direct response and the strategy method, holding other elements of the game fixed. Existing experimental studies of cheap talk games use the standard direct response method, while the strategy method—in which subjects make selections for all contingent choices—is believed to encourage more thoughtful decisionmaking. We therefore expect senders to transmit less information with the strategy method than with direct response. In contrast, we find the reverse: the strategy method increased overcommunication. Further examination suggests that this occurred because senders played more naïvely with the strategy method than with direct response. Our findings suggest that the strategy method and direct response do not elicit the same choices in cheap talk games.
2019
- GEBThe limited value of a second opinion: Competition and exaggeration in experimental cheap talk gamesWilliam Minozzi, and Jonathan WoonGames and Economic Behavior, 2019
We experimentally investigate the effect of a second opinion on information transmission. Our design varies the number of senders as well as the alignment and magnitude of senders’ biases in a sequential, cheap-talk, sender-receiver game. We find that decision makers do no better when a second opinion is available, irrespective of the alignment or competition between advisers, than when they receive a single opinion. Despite the fact that messaging behavior differs across experimental conditions, receivers successfully extract the same amount of information—an amount greater than what is theoretically predicted. These findings are consistent with senders using a simple strategy of naïve exaggeration, with receivers correctly recognizing this and adjusting their behavior accordingly.
- PRQThe Macro-dynamics of Partisan AdvantageLogan Dancey, Matthew Tarpey, and Jonathan WoonPolitical Research Quarterly, 2019
How do party reputations change over time? We construct a measure of the common movement in the parties’ perceived policy handling abilities for the period 1980 to 2016 and investigate its relationship with the public’s evaluation of Congress and the president. In contrast to key claims made in theories of congressional parties, we find an inconsistent relationship between evaluations of Congress and party reputations and find no evidence that successful agenda control enhances the majority party’s reputation. Instead, our analysis shows a strong relationship between party reputations and presidential approval, reaffirming the central role the president plays in shaping party reputations.
- JEBOElections, ability, and candidate honestyJonathan Woon, and Kristin KanthakJournal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2019
An important function of elections is to select the best representative, a task facilitated when candidates are honest about their qualifications. But are they? To what extent do candidates’ claims depend on the alignment of incentives between themselves and voters? We conduct an incentivized laboratory experiment in which candidates can choose to be honest or to exaggerate, varying the benefits of winning office. We find that strong office motives clearly induce exaggeration and, surprisingly, that only about half of laboratory candidates tell the truth even when incentives are completely aligned. We show that the prevalence of lying in elections results not from impure (e.g., Machiavellian) motives, but rather as a rational response to the expectation that other candidates will lie. Although honesty and integrity are desirable virtues in elected officials, our experiment suggests that the nature of electoral processes can make dishonesty endemic to the democratic selection of leaders.
2018
- APSRPrimaries and Candidate Polarization: Behavioral Theory and Experimental EvidenceJonathan WoonAmerican Political Science Review, 2018
Do primary elections cause candidates to take extreme, polarized positions? Standard equilibrium analysis predicts full convergence to the median voter’s position with complete information, but behavioral game theory predicts divergence when players are policy-motivated and have out-of-equilibrium beliefs. Theoretically, I show that primary elections can cause greater extremism or moderation, depending on the beliefs candidates and voters have about their opponents. In a controlled incentivized experiment, I find that candidates diverge substantially and that primaries have little effect on average positions. Voters employ a strategy that weeds out candidates who are either too moderate or too extreme, which enhances ideological purity without increasing divergence. The analysis highlights the importance of behavioral assumptions in understanding the effects of electoral institutions.
- JOPHow Hard to Fight? Cross-Player Effects and Strategic Sophistication in an Asymmetric Contest ExperimentStephen Chaudoin, and Jonathan WoonThe Journal of Politics, 2018
Many political phenomena—from wars to elections and lobbying—involve winner-take-all contests in which the value of the prize differs across the actors involved and from one issue to the next. To better understand competitive behavior in such environments, we conduct a controlled laboratory experiment in which participants face a series of asymmetric prize values in a lottery contest game. We find support for some, but not all, of the game’s comparative static predictions. Most subjects respond to changes in their own values, but few subjects conditionally respond to cross-player changes. We also administer two information-based treatments—feedback and a calculator—finding that feedback on past play has a stronger effect on decreasing socially wasteful effort than a payoff calculator. Our data suggest a new type of heterogeneity in the degree of strategic sophistication, one that differs from the existing models of iterated reasoning.
2016
- GEBCompetition, preference uncertainty, and jamming: A strategic communication experimentWilliam Minozzi, and Jonathan WoonGames and Economic Behavior, 2016
We conduct a game-theoretic laboratory experiment to investigate the nature of information transmission in a communication environment featuring competition and information asymmetry. Two senders have private information about their preferences and simultaneously send messages to a receiver in a one-dimensional space with a large number of states, actions, and messages. We find that equilibrium predictions fare poorly and that senders overcommunicate by consistently exaggerating their messages. Over time, exaggeration increases and communication unravels. Our analysis suggests that exaggeration and unraveling can only be partially explained by bounded rationality models of iterated reasoning or belief learning. Instead, behavior is consistent with a naive form of exaggeration in which senders know they must exaggerate, but they do so in an understated way that is less responsive to their private information or to opponents’ past behavior than would be fully optimal.
2015
- PACompeting Gridlock Models and Status Quo PoliciesJonathan Woon, and Ian Palmer CookPolitical Analysis, 2015
Spatial theories of lawmaking predict that legislative productivity is increasing in the number of status quo policies that lie outside the gridlock interval, but because locations of status quo policies are difficult to measure, previous empirical tests of gridlock theories rely on an auxiliary assumption that the distribution of status quo points is fixed and uniform. This assumption is at odds with the theories being tested, as it ignores the history dependence of lawmaking. We provide an alternative method for testing competing theories by estimating structural models that explicitly account for temporal dependence in a theoretically consistent way. Our analysis suggests that legislative productivity depends both on parties and supermajority pivots, and we find patterns of productivity consistent with a weaker, contingent form of party influence than found in previous work. Parties appear to exert agenda power only on highly salient legislation rather than strongly influencing outcomes through voting pressure and party unity.
- AJPSWomen Don’t Run? Election Aversion and Candidate EntryKristin Kanthak, and Jonathan WoonAmerican Journal of Political Science, 2015
To study gender differences in candidate emergence, we conduct a laboratory experiment in which we control the incentives potential candidates face, manipulate features of the electoral environment, and measure beliefs and preferences. We find that men and women are equally likely to volunteer when the representative is chosen randomly, but that women are less likely to become candidates when the representative is chosen by an election. This difference does not arise from disparities in abilities, risk aversion, or beliefs, but rather from the specific competitive and strategic context of campaigns and elections. Thus, we find evidence that women are election averse, whereas men are not. Election aversion persists with variations in the electoral environment, disappearing only when campaigns are both costless and completely truthful.
2014
- JEPSAn Experimental Study of Electoral Incentives and Institutional ChoiceJonathan WoonJournal of Experimental Political Science, 2014
I investigate the extent to which reputational incentives affect policy choices in the context of a controlled laboratory experiment. In theory, asymmetric information and outcome unobservability undermine electoral delegation by creating incentives for politicians to pander. Under the right conditions, it may be preferable to remove such incentives by removing accountability altogether. The data suggest that subjects playing the role of politicians fail to take advantage of voters even though voters indeed create the predicted electoral incentives, albeit in a weaker form than predicted by the theory. When given the choice of institutions via a novel elicitation method, subjects prefer to retain electoral accountability or to make decisions themselves through direct democracy, even though both institutions yield lower expected payoffs than delegation to unaccountable agents.
- CTPDelaying the Buck: Timing and Strategic Advantages in Executive-Legislative Bargaining over AppropriationsSarah E. Anderson, and Jonathan WoonCongress & the Presidency, 2014
Delay is a common feature of appropriations politics. Although members of Congress and the president often decry lengthy delays in the passage of appropriations bills, we investigate whether such delays might confer strategic advantages, and if so, to whom. We draw from bargaining theory to understand how the relationship between the duration of negotiations and outcomes depends on the underlying distribution of bargaining power and the nature of the bargaining process. In our empirical analysis, we find that delay is associated with greater concessions to the president, but not with more extreme outcomes. We also find that the House and Senate concede more to presidents who prefer less spending, while the Senate is more responsive to presidential needs during presidential election years. These results suggest that the president’s power comes from the asymmetry of veto and proposal rights, rather than from symmetric bargaining with proposals and counterproposals or a “war of nerves.”
2013
- JTPLying aversion, lobbying, and context in a strategic communication experimentWilliam Minozzi, and Jonathan WoonJournal of Theoretical Politics, 2013
Almost all institutions within modern democracies depend on a mix of communication and competition. However, most formal theory and experimental evidence ignores one of these two features. We present a formal theory of communicative competition in which senders vary in their aversion to lying, and test hypotheses from this theory using a strategic communication experiment. To influence lying aversion, we compare a Context Condition, in which pre-play instructions are cast in political language, with a Baseline Condition, in which all language is abstract. We find that in early rounds of play, subjects in the Context Condition exaggerated more as a function of their biases than those in the Baseline Condition when we control for the past history of play. However, by the last round of play, subjects in both conditions converged on persistent exaggeration. This finding indicates that competition crowds outlying aversion in settings of strategic communication.
2012
- LSQPolitical Bargaining and the Timing of Congressional AppropriationsJonathan Woon, and Sarah E. AndersonLegislative Studies Quarterly, 2012
Although Congress passes spending bills every year, there is great variation in the amount of time it takes. Drawing from rational models of bargaining, we identify factors that systematically affect the duration of legislative bargaining in the appropriations process. Analysis of spending bills for fiscal years 1977 to 2009 shows that delays are shorter when the ideological distance between pairs of key players decreases and distributive content is higher, but they are longer following an election. We find that congressional parties matter but that intraparty conflict matters as well, which suggests that Appropriations Committees retain significant autonomy in Congress.
- AJPSDemocratic Accountability and Retrospective Voting: A Laboratory ExperimentJonathan WoonAmerican Journal of Political Science, 2012
Understanding the incentives of politicians requires understanding the nature of voting behavior. I conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate whether voters focus on the problem of electoral selection or if they instead focus on electoral sanctioning. If voters are forward-looking but uncertain about politicians’ unobservable characteristics, then it is rational to focus on selection. But doing so undermines democratic accountability because selection renders sanctioning an empty threat. In contrast to rational choice predictions, the experimental results indicate a strong behavioral tendency to use a retrospective voting rule. Additional experiments support the interpretation that retrospective voting is a simple heuristic that voters use to cope with a cognitively difficult inference and decision problem and, in addition, suggest that voters have a preference for accountability. The results pose a challenge for theories of electoral selection and voter learning and suggest new interpretations of empirical studies of economic and retrospective voting.
2011
- AJPSAn Experimental Investigation of Electoral Delegation and the Provision of Public GoodsJohn R. Hamman, Roberto A. Weber, and Jonathan WoonAmerican Journal of Political Science, 2011
How effectively do democratic institutions provide public goods? Despite the incentives an elected leader has to free ride or impose majority tyranny, our experiment demonstrates that electoral delegation results in full provision of the public good. Analysis of the experimental data suggests that the result is primarily due to electoral selection: groups elect prosocial leaders and replace those who do not implement full contribution outcomes. However, we also observe outcomes in which a minimum winning coalition exploits the contributions of the remaining players. A second experiment demonstrates that when electoral delegation must be endogenously implemented, individuals voluntarily cede authority to an elected agent only when preplay communication is permitted. Our combined results demonstrate that democratic delegation helps groups overcome the free-rider problem and generally leads to outcomes that are often both efficient and equitable.
2009
- PRQMeasuring Changes in American Party Reputations, 1939—2004Jeremy C. Pope, and Jonathan WoonPolitical Research Quarterly, 2009
Scholars increasingly emphasize that party reputations are valuable electoral assets. The authors measure temporal change in the parties’ relative reputations across several distinct policy areas and find that each party tends to have advantages on certain issues but that the patterns are far from permanent. Democrats have strong advantages on social welfare issues, but Republicans have made some gains. Republican advantages on taxes and “law and order” have been weaker. The authors also find that party competition has strengthened impressions of the parties. Results support the notion that parties carry a collective—if occasionally transitory—reputation on a host of issues.
- LSQIssue Attention and Legislative Proposals in the U.S. SenateJonathan WoonLegislative Studies Quarterly, 2009
This analysis of bill sponsorship across a variety of issues and Congresses shows that committee membership is the single most important factor shaping a senator’s level of issue attention. Constituency demand is of secondary importance. Ideology, partisanship, and national conditions play little or no role. Consistent with a theoretical cost-benefit framework, the results suggest that senators are motivated by the prospect of electoral and policy rewards from successful legislation rather than from mere position taking. The findings attest to the enduring importance of the committee system in a highly individualistic and increasingly partisan Senate.
- PSChange We Can Believe In? Using Political Science to Predict Policy Change in the Obama PresidencyJonathan WoonPS: Political Science & Politics, 2009
Based on the results of the 2008 presidential and congressional elections, an analysis using theories and methods of modern political science (pivotal politics theory, ideal point estimates, and bootstrap simulations) suggests that the conditions are ripe for real policy change. Specifically, we should expect policies to move significantly in a liberal direction, few or no policies should move in a conservative direction, and many of the outcomes will be moderate or somewhat to the left of center (rather than far left). Furthermore, the predictions depend as much on partisan polarization and the results of the congressional election as they do on the outcome of presidential election itself.
2008
- JOPMade in Congress? Testing the Electoral Implications of Party Ideological Brand NamesJonathan Woon, and Jeremy C. PopeThe Journal of Politics, 2008
We investigate the connection between legislative parties and election outcomes, focusing on ideological party brand names that inform voters. If the source of information conveyed by brand names is the party’s aggregate roll-call record, then changes in legislative party membership should influence election returns. We formalize the argument with an expected utility model of voting and derive district-level hypotheses, which we test on U.S. House elections from 1952 to 2000. We test alternative specifications that vary with respect to the specificity of voter information and find that party positions and heterogeneity both affect vote share independently of incumbents’ positions. The results provide modest support for the expected utility model but nevertheless suggest that Congress is an important source of the public’s beliefs about the parties, and this effect is clearest for challengers, rather than incumbents, who run under the party’s label.
- JOPBill Sponsorship in Congress: The Moderating Effect of Agenda Positions on Legislative ProposalsJonathan WoonThe Journal of Politics, 2008
Positions of influence over the legislative agenda provide greater opportunities for shaping policy outcomes. Do legislators take advantage of this? If they do, when the median is pivotal and legislators’ goals reflect both position taking and policy seeking, greater influence over the agenda leads legislators to moderate their bills relative to legislators with lower agenda priority. Analysis of a formal game theoretic model provides rigorous justification for the proposition, and empirical analysis of House and Senate bills from the 101st to 108th Congresses using cosponsorship data to measure the ideological locations of bills largely supports it. Committee leadership and majority party status have moderating effects while the effect of committee membership is slight. The analysis also tentatively supports the pivotalness of the median over other alternatives. Contrary to the view that bill sponsorship is mere position taking, legislative organization significantly shapes early-stage legislative behavior. Specifically, greater legislative influence implies greater responsiveness to the median legislator.
2007
- SPPQDirect Democracy and the Selection of Representative Institutions: Voter Support for Apportionment Initiatives, 1924–62Jonathan WoonState Politics & Policy Quarterly, 2007
If voters had the opportunity to choose the characteristics of their representative institutions directly, how would they do so? Voters in several states selected the base of their state legislative apportionment through the initiative process prior to the reapportionment revolution of the 1960s, which provides a unique opportunity to answer this question. This study examines 13 such initiatives in four states between 1924 and 1962. Four factors are hypothesized to influence vote choice on these initiatives: urban-rural confict, partisanship, race, and economic self-interest. Through regression analysis of the county-level vote in these elections I find that economic self-interest consistently influences voter support for apportionment initiatives while these other factors influence it only occasionally. This finding suggests that distributive politics drive voters’ evaluation of representative institutions and that the influence of other political factors depends on the historical and local context of an initiative.