Are Voters Risk Averse? Specifying Utility Functions in Spatial Models of Voting

• In Event: Advances in Scaling Models

Brief Overview

We examine the specification of voters' utility functions by applying alpha-NOMINATE to public opinion data, and find that the quadratic function is usually a poor choice and that voters are less averse to risk and ambiguity than usually assumed.

Authors

• Carlos Andres Algara, University of Texas, El Paso

• Cory Renee Belden, University of California-Davis

• Samuel Fuller, University of California, Davis

• Christopher Hare, University of California-Davis