Before a group can take a decision, its members must agree on a mechanism to aggregate individual preferences. In this paper we present the results of an experiment on the influence of private payoff information and the role of the available alternatives on individuals’ mechanism choices in...

One of the most consistent findings in studies of electoral behaviour is that individuals with higher education have a greater propensity to vote. The nature of this relationship is much debated, with US studies generally finding evidence of a causal relationship, while European studies...

Party politics in Ireland has been characterised as politics without a social base. This paper calculates political concentration indices for party support in Ireland showing how support for a particular party is concentrated according to identifiable dimensions such as income, education and...

I investigate the effects of population ageing on immigration policies. Voters' attitude towards immigrants depends on how the net gains from immigration are divided up in the society by the fiscal policy. In the theoretical literature this aspect is treated as exogenous to the political process...

How should a society choose between two social alternatives if participation in the decision process is voluntary and costly and monetary transfers are not feasible? Considering symmetric voters with private valuations, we show that it is utilitarian-optimal to use a linear voting rule: votes...

We propose and validate a task to induce acute socio-evaluative stress in the laboratory. The task features performance-based pay and simultaneously creates a treatment and a control group. Employing this task, we study the influence of acute socio-evaluative stress on the propensity to tell a...