People's Favorite Electoral Rule Behind the Veil of Ignorance: A Lab Experiment

The literature shows that parties and voters tend to favor the electoral rule that best serves their interest. When an electoral reform is on the political agenda of their country, they support a change if they expect that the new rule would increase their chances to be elected (for parties) or to see their preferred party being elected (for voters). In this paper, we give new insights to this topic in analyzing data from a voting experiment in France and Great Britain. In the first phase, participants experience elections under plurality and approval voting. In the second phase, they decide which of these two rules they want to use for extra elections. The treatment is whether they know their spatial position, and hence which electoral rule maximize their payoff, before choosing the rule in the second phase. Participants favor the electoral rule that best serves their interest when they know their position, and favor the electoral rule most in line with their own values when they are behind the veil of ignorance.