We study a model of popular demand for anti-elite populist reforms that drain the swamp: replace experienced public servants with novices that will only acquire experience with time. Voters benefit from experienced public servants because they are more effective at delivering public goods and more competent at detecting emergency threats. However, public servants’ policy preferences do not always align with those of voters. This tradeoff produces two key forces in our model: public servants’ incompetence spurs disagreement between them and voters, and their effectiveness grants them more power to dictate policymaking. Both of these effects fuel mistrust between voters and public servants, sometimes inducing voters to drain the swamp in cycles of anti-elite populism. We study which factors can sustain a responsive democracy or induce a technocracy. When instead populism arises, we discuss which reforms may alleviate the frequency of populist cycles.

We compare Ranked-Choice Voting (RCV) and Plurality Voting (PV) in elections with 3 candidates. Voters receive consequential benefits from the election of a candidate close to their preferred policy position and also benefit from expressing their preferences sincerely. We provide conditions under which RCV will ensure both the existence of a sincere voting equilibrium and the election of the Condorcet winner, while PV may fail in both respects.

There is a small literature that tests binary voting behaviour in the laboratory – think of voting in a jury trial (but without discussion between jurors). Most of these experiments use symmetric loss functions – both types of error (convicting the innocent and acquitting the guilty) receive the same penalty – even when the unanimity rule is used to determine the outcome (i.e., the defendant is acquitted unless all jurors vote guilty). There is one extant study (Anderson et al., 2015) that employs a loss function with a higher penalty for convicting the innocent, and its results show by far the largest difference between the data and the theoretical prediction. We have conducted two more voting experiments involving an asymmetric loss function. This study discusses our results, as well as those of Anderson et al. (2015), and assesses the prospects of reconciling the data with theory.