Public sector employee voter participation and salaries

Abstract

The hypothesis advanced by Downs (1957) that rational, utility-maximizing citizens would calculate the benefits and costs of voting in deciding whether to vote often has been employed to argue that voter participation rates among government employees should exceed that of comparable private sector individuals. The basic rationale for that prediction was laid out by Downs (1957: 254) who argued that "those who stand the most to gain are the men who earn their incomes there." Higher voter participation rates for government employees coupled with an implied preference for the expansion of the public sector has also played a role in efforts to explain the growth of government (Borcherding, Bush and Spann, 1977; and Bush and Denzau, 1977). In addition to benefiting from the supply of public goods and services, as do all voters, government employees are seen as benefiting from the expansion of government through an increase in their salaries. In this paper, the issue of voter participation rates for government employees is reexamined. Current Population Survey (CPS) data tapes containing information on individual voter behavior for the 1984 and 1986 national elections are used to estimate a qualitative choice model.1 Consistent with previous findings, the results presented indicate that government employees, as a group, are more likely to vote than are private sector workers with similar socioeconomic and demographic characteristics (Wolfinger and Rosenstone, 1980). Unlike previous studies, however, we distinguish between federal and state and local employees. This distinction is important. Building on the Downsian hypothesis that the cost and benefits of voting matter, the arguments offered in the following section lead to the prediction that the probability of voting should be lower for federal employees than for state and local. The empirical