Warm Glow Voting? An Analysis of Turnout in Portugal

Abstract

Since Downs’s (1957) famous description of the paradox of voting, the individual motivation to cast a vote in big elections has given rise to a vast theoretical, empirical, and experimental literature. This paper uses data from a survey of around 1000 Portuguese voters with information about their decision to turnout in several elections. My main result is that individuals vote because they value the act of voting – warm glow voting – and not to affect the outcome of the election. My data includes a randomized survey experiment with two treatments. One is an official message about the importance of voting as civic duty; the other explains how the proportional D’Hondt method fails to use all the ballots in the conversion from votes to seats. Using the sense of duty treatment as an instrumental variable, I find causal evidence that the sense of duty increases the probability that an individual turns out to vote.