Being a voter: developing a survey instrument for expressive voting

Edward Fieldhouse

doi:10.1080/17457289.2018.1530679

Edward Fieldhouse

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1080/17457289.2018.1530679

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Abstract

ABSTRACTIt has been argued that expressive motivations are a crucial element in persuading people to vote, overcoming the “paradox of voting” and it has been demonstrated that in experimental situations, subjects behave in a manner consistent with expressive voting. However, there have been limited attempts at operationalizing expressive voting in a survey context and these have been unable to successfully separate the influence of outcome related benefits (instrumental pay-offs) from expressive pay-offs. In this paper, we use a web survey experiment to first identify citizens with a propensity to behave expressively and then assess the validity of the instrument.

Highlights

Why do people vote when the chance that they will affect the outcome is vanishingly small? This is a question that has troubled political scientists for decades
It has been argued that expressive motivations are a crucial element in persuading people to vote, overcoming the “paradox of voting” and it has been demonstrated that in experimental situations, subjects behave in a manner consistent with expressive voting
Do we find a significant correlation between the instrument and the standard BES measure of civic duty5 but a regression model (Table 4) confirms that this survives controls for age, gender and political interest

Summary

Introduction

Why do people vote when the chance that they will affect the outcome is vanishingly small? This is a question that has troubled political scientists for decades. Voting is usually correlated with education and political interest (Smets and Van Ham 2013), and this is a non-political election where such factors may be less important, we control for political interest to take this into account.3 the expressive benefits to be accrued depend on the extent to which the elector identifies with the group that the candidate represents (Schuessler 2000).

Results

Conclusion