Voting Yes or No? Studies in Behavioral Political Economics on Decision-Making, Institutions and Status Quo Bias

Do voters and politicians suffer from behavioral biases? This dissertation explores the answer to this question with detailed voting data from Switzerland. It advances the emerging and pioneering field of Behavioral Political Economics. Behavioral Political Economics examines the role of psychological aspects in political decision-making. Recent dramatic political decisions on the financial support for Greece not only highlight strategic thinking but also illustrate the impact of emotions, fatigue due to night long meetings and deep concerns of loss in peoples behavior. Thus, a thorough understanding of how political decisions are made seems to be a first order priority and may have a big impact on institutions and our social coexistence. This dissertation addresses two subjects in a comprehensive scientific investigation:First, it explores the role of emotions in voters decision-making. A number of recent studies suggest that rainy days deteriorate peoples mood, which leads them to prefer the status quo (see, e.g., Bassi, 2013). I use a novel Swiss dataset with rain in mm and municipal level vote outcomes from 1958-2009 to explore the relationship of bad weather and vote outcomes in national proposals. By conditioning on turnout, I identify the emotion effect. A preliminary estimate suggests that people prefer the status quo on rainy days. The analysis is extended in three directions: i) I assemble a dataset to explore the role of emotions in voters decision-making by measuring the effect of rainfall on emotions, ii) I investigate the effect of rain on turnout in great detail with unique post-ballot survey data and iii) I replicate a result of two seminal studies about the effect of rainfall on election outcomes, highlighting the role of an emotion effect.Second, this dissertation investigates bounded rationality of politicians. More specifically, it examines the effect of high workload on politicians decision-making. As of now, we have very limited knowledge about mistaken choices of politicians (Schnellenbach and Schubert, 2015). This lack of empirical evidence is severe, given that politicians have a large weight in determining politics. In a first investigation I use a unique dataset on legislative decision-making in Switzerland to study choice fatigue. I have information on the exact timing of more than 500 politicians’ 2.4 million decisions from 1996-2012. This data allow me to investigate how politicians’ propensity of voting for the status quo changes, given the time of day or the number of decisions made before. In a further analysis, I gather data from all US state parliaments complemented by information on the legislators and the institutional environment. This data will allow for careful examination of institutional effects on choice fatigue and status quo bias. In sum, the two projects shed light on behavioral aspects of political decision-making. First, learning about the role of emotions in voters decision-making may eventually lead to a better understanding of why narratives of parties are powerful in convincing voters or how emotionally tense votes (e.g., on migration) are decided. Ultimately, this will help to assess the design of democratic institutions. Second, there has been no research in the field of economics that is concerned with cognitive constraints in politicians. Showing that such constraints exist may, in a first step, lead to a reconsideration of how to organize parliamentary sessions.