Sequential Voting, Abstention, and Herding: Evidence from the German Reichstag, US Congress, and Nevada State Assembly (with Frank Häge)

Sequential voting procedures are used in many legislatures. Despite long-standing concerns that such processes create information asymmetries that amplify unequal influence, herding, and strategic voting, we lack empirical evidence that sequential voting affects legislative behavior and how it does so. This paper provides evidence from two research designs in three legislatures on the effects of sequential voting procedures. In the 1970s, the U.S. Congress and the Nevada legislature switched from sequential voting to electronic voting procedures. In the 19th century, the German Reichstag used sequential voting with a rotating starting point. We find that a legislator’s position in the vote order affected both abstention and aligning with chamber and party majorities. The mechanisms behind sequential voting effects appear to vary across legislatures, with ambiguous, but small consequences for information aggregation.

The Minimal Effects of Public Health Campaigns on Travel During the COVID-19 Pandemic (with Ethan Bueno de Mesquita, Mehdi Shadmehr, and Benjamin Shaver)

We explore the effectiveness of a public health campaign via a large-scale field experiment during the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, approximately 125,000 households were sent mail from health experts encouraging social distancing. Targeted geographies received varying dosages of treatments, and some targeted households were informed that neighbors also received the messages, to highlight the strategic considerations underlying social distancing. We find minimal effects of the campaign on holiday travel and on other social distancing behavior. We consider our results in light of a similar intervention and conclude that travel was unlikely to be influenced by messages from public health experts.