Exit polls, turnout, and bandwagon voting: Evidence from a natural experiment

We exploit a voting reform in France to estimate the causal effect of exit poll information on turnout and bandwagon voting. Before the change in legislation, individuals in some French overseas territories voted after the election result had already been made public via exit poll information from m...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inEuropean economic review Vol. 77; pp. 65 - 81
Main Authors Morton, Rebecca B., Muller, Daniel, Page, Lionel, Torgler, Benno
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.07.2015
Elsevier Sequoia S.A
Subjects
Candidates
Causality
Election results
Elections
Electoral reform
Exit polls
France
Information
Legislation
Polls
Studies
Voter behavior
Voter turnout
Voters
Votes
Voting
Voting turnout
Western Europe
France
Elections
H50
Information
D72
Online AccessGet full text
ISSN0014-2921
1873-572X
DOI10.1016/j.euroecorev.2015.03.012

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Summary:We exploit a voting reform in France to estimate the causal effect of exit poll information on turnout and bandwagon voting. Before the change in legislation, individuals in some French overseas territories voted after the election result had already been made public via exit poll information from mainland France. We estimate that knowing the exit poll information decreases voter turnout by about 11 percentage points. Our study is the first clean empirical design outside of the laboratory to demonstrate the effect of such knowledge on voter turnout. Furthermore, we find that exit poll information significantly increases bandwagon voting; that is, voters who choose to turn out are more likely to vote for the expected winner.
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ISSN:0014-2921
1873-572X
DOI:10.1016/j.euroecorev.2015.03.012