Will quadratic voting produce optimal public policy?
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Will quadratic voting produce optimal public policy? John C. Goodman1 · Philip K. Porter2 Received: 4 April 2019 / Accepted: 6 December 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Under quadratic voting people are able to buy votes with money. The claims that rational voters will make efficient electoral choices rest on assumptions about how voters acquire and share information. Specifically, that all voters share common knowledge about the probability that any one of them will be the decisive voter, but do not (appear to) share knowledge in any specialized way within special interest groups. This paper asserts that quadratic voting is no more likely to promote efficiency than the current system of oneperson-one-vote. Information costs are critical. If information is costly, organized interest groups on either side of an issue provide low-cost information to their members and sharing common knowledge across groups is less likely. Then, small differences lead to large welfare losses. If information is free, special-interest groups provide opportunities for collusion that undermines the efficiency of quadratic voting. Even if collusion could be prevented, the dual uses of money to buy votes and to disseminate information organizes interest groups as if their members were colluding. The role of information and the fact that voting is not costless create efficiency biases under quadratic voting that favor political organization and concentrated values. To the extent that these attributes are overrepresented in the present system, quadratic voting will only make it worse. Keywords Quadratic voting · Equilibrium · Voting efficiency JEL Classification H-10 · H-11 · D-61
1 Introduction Quadratic voting has been proposed by several scholars, including in a recent book by Posner and Weyl (2019). It belongs to a class of voting models that allows voters to express the intensities of their preference along a continuum as opposed to one-person-one-vote. Perhaps the most popular is the probabilistic voting model in which voters are viewed by * Philip K. Porter [email protected] John C. Goodman [email protected] 1
Goodman Institute for Public Policy Research, Dallas, TX, USA
2
University of South Florida, Tampa, USA
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Public Choice
candidates as having probabilities of voting that are responsive to changes in the platforms they propose. Analogously, Becker (1983) considers pressure among interest groups as shaping political outcomes. In a series of papers, Goodman and Porter (1985, 1988, 2004) summarize the many ways one could influence an election—casting a vote, making campaign contributions, influencing others, and so on—as a homogeneous, continuous variable. Common to all the continuous voting models is the concept of equilibrium. If certain concavity/convexity conditions hold, a unique platform will exist that can defeat all others in a majority vote and the equilibrium is stable. By treating effort per unit of benefit (effort/benefit ra
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