Abstract:
Recent lab and field experiments have provided evidence of a positive voting effect: cooperation in social dilemmas appears to be stronger when policies are chosen by vote instead of being imposed. It remains less clear what drives this so-called "democracy premium" and whether the effect is universal. While some studies suggest that selecting cooperation-friendly rules signals cooperativeness, others suggest the effect may be limited to those who won the vote and feel committed to it. Our study identifies a different mechanism for the democracy premium: we find that the mere entitlement to voting rights enhances cooperation in a public goods game. Moreover, participating in the voting process increased individuals' cooperativeness regardless of whether their preferred rules prevailed. We also show that this democracy premium is not universal. We conducted the study in two countries at opposite ends of the democracy spectrum: Germany and China. While the German evidence supported the democracy premium across two separate laboratories, the premium was, as hypothesized, significantly smaller in our Chinese data. In both Chinese laboratories, we observed no voting benefits at all-with contributions being, if anything, lower when rules were chosen democratically.
