When do conflicting parties share political power? An experimental study

Marco Battaglini and Lydia Mechtenberg

Working Papers from Princeton University, Department of Economics, Econometric Research Program.

Abstract: We conduct a laboratory experiment to study the incentives of a privileged group to share political power with another group when the two have conflicting interests. There are two groups of participants, the "yellows" and the "blues". The yellows collectively choose the voting rule for a general election: a simple-majority rule that favors them, or a proportional rule. In two control treatments the blues can use a costly punishment option: they can punish the yellows after the outcome of the election, or after the choice of the electoral rule, but before the election. We find that the yellow group shares power voluntarily only to a small extent, but is more inclined to do so under the threat of punishment, despite the fact that punishment is not optimal in the continuation game. The blue group conditions punishment both on the voting rule and the electoral outcome: They are more inclined to punish an unfavorable outcome under the proportional rule. The evidence suggests that power sharing arises from the (suboptimal) willingness of the minority to punish selfish behavior.

JEL-codes: C92 D02 D72 D79 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-01
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://detc.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/ ... -political-power.pdf
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://detc.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/wp057_2014_Battaglini_Mechtenberg_When-do-conflicting-parties-share-political-power.pdf [302 Found]--> https://detc.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/wp057_2014_Battaglini_Mechtenberg_When-do-conflicting-parties-share-political-power.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> https://economics.princeton.edu/the-william-s-dietrich-ii-economic-theory-center/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/wp057_2014_Battaglini_Mechtenberg_When-do-conflicting-parties-share-political-power.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pri:metric:057-2014

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Princeton University, Department of Economics, Econometric Research Program. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Bobray Bordelon ().