Publication . Aguiar-Conraria, Luis; Magalhães, Pedro C.; Vanberg, Christoph A.
Many political systems with direct democracy mechanisms have adopted rules preventing
decisions from being made by simple majority rule. The device added most commonly to
majority rule in national referendums is a quorum requirement. The two most common are
participation and approval quorums. Such rules are responses to three major concerns: the
legitimacy of the referendum outcome, its representativeness, and protection of minorities
regarding issues that should demand a broad consensus. Guided by a pivotal voter model,
we conduct a laboratory experiment to investigate the performances of different quorums
in attaining such goals. We introduce two main innovations in relation to previous work on
the topic. First, part of the electorate goes to the polls out of a sense of civic duty. Second,
we test the performances of a different quorum, the rejection quorum, recently proposed in
the literature. We conclude that, depending on the preferred criterion, either the approval or
the rejection quorum is the best.
