Introduction to Social Pressure and Voting: New Experimental Evidence

Abstract

For decades, political scientists have puzzled over problems of collective action that arise when large numbers of people are asked to contribute to a public good. When any one person's contribution to the collective cause is negligible and the outcome can be enjoyed even by people who do not contribute, collective action fizzles because no individual has an incentive to sacrifice for a collective cause. This grim analytic framework is often applied to voting, where individuals are asked to expend time and effort, yet have little chance of casting a pivotal vote (Downs 1957). The fact that large numbers of people do in fact vote has led scholars to theorize about the "selective incentives" (Olson 1965) that induce people to participate in elections. One hypothesis is that people derive intrinsic satisfaction from casting their ballots. They either enjoy the act of voting per se or feel good about themselves for advancing a partisan cause or honoring a civic obligation. A second hypothesis, and the focus of this symposium, posits that people receive sidepayments when they contribute to a collective cause. In electoral systems where bribes and other material inducements are rare, incentives are thought to be social in nature: voters are rewarded by the approbation of others, while nonvoters are criticized or shunned. In other words, people are rewarded or punished according to whether they comply with social norms (Cialdini and Trost 1985), such as the expectation that citizens ought to participate in elections. When authors in this volume use the term "social pressure," they have in mind communications that play upon a basic human drive to win praise and avoid chastisement. Social pressure may be exerted by praising those who uphold norms or scorning those who violate them. Social pressure increases with the amount of praise or scorn, which is why social pressure is thought to be amplified when a person's compliance with social norms is disclosed to others. For this reason, social pressure communications typically involve three ingredients: they admonish the