Costly expressive voting

Abstract

We incorporate expressive utility into Börgers’ (2004) canonical symmetric model of costly voting. It is shown that, under reasonable conditions, there exist two types of Bayesian Equilibria, those in which voters vote instrumentally and those in which they vote expressively. We show that equilibria in which voting is expressive is characterized by higher turnout and higher welfare. It is also shown that, in contrast to Borgers, when voting is expressive, turnout is too low.