I think that this is a great public forum topic: it relates to a current event that will educate students on some of the nuanc

13NFL1-Compulsory Voting
Page 133 of 163
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COMPULSORY VOTING DISTORTS THE TRUE WILL OF THE MAJORITY BY CAUSING
INDIFFERENT VOTERS TO ENGAGE IN HERD BEHAVIOR.
KEITH JAKEE and GUANG-ZHEN SUN
– 2006. Is compulsory voting more democratic Public Choice (2006) 129: 61
–75.

A potentially serious complication can arise when an individual does not have sufficient interest or information to decide on the alternative candidates. Such a setting can give rise to what have been called information cascades, phenomena that seem to present themselves widely in economic, political and social situations An informational cascade occurs when it is
optimal
for an individual
, having observed the actions of those ahead of him, to follow the behavior of the preceding individual without regard to his own information (Bikhchandani et alp, our italics. In our model, the random voter’s information is assumed to be virtually zero. However, what is optimal for the individual is not, of course, necessarily optimal for society. Some uninformed voters may well attempt to determine which candidate to vote for by observing what other voters do, just as consumers do in choosing restaurants and, say, other fashion goods. If so, herd behavior is the result. In other words, the distortion effect caused by random voting under a mandatory voting system will be even more remarkable if information cascades are present. Consider a hypothetical scenario in which there are 99 voters and two candidates,
A
and
B
. There are 49 interested voters, all favoring
A
, and 50 random voters. Suppose that the random voters all go to one polling booth, one by one, and each voter simply follows the preceding voter in choosing
A
or
B
, while all informed voters go to another polling booth. By definition, each of our random voters has no preference concerning the candidate,
ex ante
, and consequently the voting decision becomes one of following the signals of other voters, particularly the immediately preceding one.

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