Abstract
Each year about 60 million people flee their home country and seek to cross into developed countries, thus urging the latter to develop different policy responses to face the growing concerns about how immigration may affect social order. We design a novel two-part public goods experiment with radical income asymmetry between groups to investigate how voting on (not) helping less-endowed others affects pro-social behavior in the voting groups. We find that no group ever votes to help less-endowed ones. This, in turn, results in a breakdown of prosociality within the voting groups. We study the reasons why the implementation of voting—compared to no voting or to imposed solidarity—results in a significant, negative impact on cooperation levels within the voting groups.
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Notes
See the International Organization for Migration’s database on http://migration.iom.int/europe/.
More specifically, the question on the ballot asked whether “you are in favor of the EU being allowed to make the settlement of non-Hungarians obligatory in Hungary even if the parliament does not agree”.
In a recent paper, Grigorieff et al. (2017) study whether providing information about immigrants affects people’s attitudes towards them. They focus on people’s attitudes towards immigrants and how these can be changed with various types of information.
It should be noted that there are theoretical models predicting how local public goods contributions might be affected when a district attracts new immigrants. For instance, Schultz and Sjostrom (2001) developed a two-community model in which a district might experience congestion in the consumption of local public goods because it attracts new immigrants. However, there are no empirical studies of the impact of voting on immigration on the native population’s willingness to contribute to the provision of local public goods.
On the power of commitment in public goods games, see Dannenberg et al. (2014).
We should note from the outset that, contrary to the literature on the minimal group paradigm (see Hargreaves Heap and Zizzo 2009; Pan and Houser 2013), we did not induce group identity other than the random formation of groups, as is common in standard public goods experiments. In this sense, ingroup identity is minimal in our experiment. Indeed, the only difference between ingroups and outgroups is that they belong to different groups that have been randomly formed. We do acknowledge that immigrants have a different identity from the natives. However, since this is the first laboratory experiment to test for the effect of inter-group solidarity on ingroup cooperation, we wanted to study this question in a neutral environment so as to provide a lower bound on how local public goods provision could be affected by the refusal to share the social benefits with “others”. It is reasonable to expect that when people belong to different group identities then the probability that one group agrees to share the benefits from its public account with another group is lower than in the absence of identity differences. Experimental research found, indeed, that subjects tend to protect the interests of their ingroups (Klor and Shayo 2010).
To the best of our knowledge, the only other experiment showing that voting may have a negative effect on group cohesion is Cappelen et al. (2014). However, they investigate the effect of free-choice on people’s willingness to redistribute but not on the voluntary contributions to the provision of local (congestible) public goods.
The language used in the instructions was neutral, we informed subjects that the computer will randomly select half of the groups in the room to have no endowment for the entire second sequence of the experiment.
The voting procedure was common knowledge. Subjects in the zero and positive endowment groups were aware that the positive endowment groups had to vote.
The monetary cost of sharing in our experiment is high. However, if the majority votes in favor of sharing, the group optimum still requires that subjects contribute all tokens to the group account; the dominant strategy, however, is to contribute nothing. We decided to divide the amount contributed by 10 because we did not want to assume that the technology to produce the public good changes with the sharing decision. In our experiment, the “internal” and “external” MPCR are equal (Goeree et al. 2002). These changes might influence the voting decision in different ways. However, in this experiment, we want to examine post-voting behavior and not voting itself.
The computer program was developed with LE2M, the software dedicated to experimental economics developed by the engineers of the LAMETA.
It is worth noting that the implementation of a given treatment was always decided randomly at the very beginning of each experimental session.
It is important to keep in mind that game theory, in general, is mute about the content of an agent’s utility. The experimental literature testing game theoretic predictions chose to use self-regarding preferences in formulating the standard Nash equilibrium (Cox 2004). It is, however, possible to include a preference for others’ income in an agent’s utility functions and then apply Nash or subgame perfection to the resulting game.
Obviously, the game is subject to the typical problem of majority voting games: there are multiple equilibria. In particular, there is an equilibrium in which all selfish voters vote for sharing the public good: if agent j believes that the four other group members vote for sharing, then j is indifferent between voting for sharing or not since j cannot influence the voting outcome, and can also vote for sharing. Thus, each group member voting for sharing is in fact an equilibrium under selfish preferences. In addition, if j thinks nobody will vote in favor of sharing anyway, then sharing or not sharing does not make any difference. If we assume that j expects his vote to determine the voting outcome, then his voting decision reveals his willingness to share the group’s account with one zero-endowment group.
See Engel and Rockenbach (2014) for a similar result.
We measured risk aversion based on Vieider et al.’s (2015) survey question, which has been shown to correlate with incentivized lottery choices in most countries.
We measure preferences for redistribution with a question taken from the World Value Survey. The question asks to what extent the respondent agrees with the following statement: “The government should take measures to reduce income inequalities”. This question has been used in previous research (see Alesina and Giuliano 2009).
We asked subjects whether politically they situate themselves on the extreme left, left, center, right, or extreme right of the political spectrum.
One might think that the inequality-aversion model yields a different prediction about the post-voting behavior if we suppose that the zero-endowment group is the reference group for subjects in the positive-endowment groups. In this case, the latter would reduce contributions in order to minimize the difference between their earnings and the earnings of the zero-endowment group. However, one should also make this assumption in the NOSOL treatment. Thus, we should observe no differences in post-voting behavior between the VOTE and the NOSOL treatments.
The small number of subjects who voted in favor of sharing (19 subjects overall) and of those who voted against (41 subjects) does not allow us to make deterministic statements about the determinants of contribution decisions for each of these two categories of voters separately.
Due to a small number of votes in favor of sharing, the non-parametric test of the difference between subjects’ predictions before they learn the outcome of the vote and after indicates that we cannot reject the hypothesis that there is no difference between the two (Wilcoxon signed-rank test, \({p}=0.373\)).
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For valuable insights at various stages of this work, we are grateful to Marina Agranov, Gary Charness, Rachel Croson, Julie Rosaz, Lise Vesterlund, Marie-Claire Villeval, and an anonymous reviewer. The paper also benefited from discussions with participants at the Pittsburgh Experimental Economics Lab meetings, the Laboratory for Experimental Economics in Montpellier meeting, the French Association of Experimental Economics meeting, the 2017 Public Choice Society meeting, and the Experimental Public Choice meeting in Lille.
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Romaniuc, R., DeAngelo, G.J., Dubois, D. et al. Intergroup inequality and the breakdown of prosociality. Econ Gov 20, 285–303 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10101-019-00226-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10101-019-00226-2