The Drowning-Out Effect: Voter Turnout and Protests

Conventional wisdom suggests that a high turnout in a free and fair election would be laudable; it might signify proper representation and hence facilitate democratic conflict resolution. This paper presents a game-theoretic model and demonstrates that this intuition does not necessarily hold. With large voting costs, only people of intense preferences turn out, and thus the electoral results represent their opinions. In contrast, small voting costs allow people of lukewarm preferences to turn out. Because such lukewarm voters usually constitute a majority, the results of the election represent the opinions of the lukewarm majority and drown out the voices of the intense minority. This incentivizes the intense minority to raise their voices via outside options such as protests. Thus, rather counterintuitively, high turnout increases protests. I test this hypothesis using election-day rainfall as an instrumental variable for turnout and apply it to Indian State Assembly elections. The results indicate that higher turnout increases the likelihood of protests. The analyses on the causal mechanisms and robustness provide further credence to the finding.