Uncertainty and resistance to reform in laboratory participation games

This paper presents a participation game experiment to study the impact of uncertainty and costly political participation on the incidence of reform. We introduce intra-group conflict into the framework of Fernandez and Rodrik (1991) [Fernandez, R., Rodrik, D., 1991. Resistance to reform: status quo bias in the presence of individual-specific uncertainty. American Economic Review 81, 1146-1155] by incorporating costly political participation, which creates a natural incentive for free-riding on fellow group members' efforts to influence policy outcomes. Our experimental findings show that uncertainty reduces the incidence of reform even with costly political participation and that an increase in the cost of participation reduces the participation of all agents, regardless of whether they belong to the majority and minority. This second result cannot be reconciled with the standard mixed strategy Nash equilibrium, but is consistent with the quantal response equilibrium.