Threshold Voting Mechanism

This randomized online experiment tests a threshold voting mechanism that aims to balance privacy and information revelation in collective decision-making. Public voting fosters coordination and accountability but risks conformity through social image concerns. Private voting protects truthful expression but obscures the distribution of preferences. Standard voting systems thus force a stark trade-off: truthful voting at the expense of accountability, or full accountability at the expense of truthful expression. We study an intermediate institution, the threshold voting mechanism. Individuals first cast their vote anonymously, then choose a personal threshold: their vote is revealed publicly only if the number of others voting the same way reaches or exceeds that threshold. UC Berkeley students enrolled in Fall 2025 are randomly assigned to private, public, or threshold voting conditions on a contentious policy proposal. This design allows us to measure the distortions created by public voting and whether the threshold mechanism reduces those distortions while preserving information about underlying preferences.