What Motivates People to Vote? The Role of Selfishness, Duty, and Social Motives When Voting

Valentina A Bali,Richard Winder,Lindon J Robison

doi:10.1177/2158244020950376

Abstract

This study assesses the relative importance and explanatory power of five fundamental psychological motives for voting. Using United States survey data, we analyze self-reports on the motives of selfishness, duty, altruism, belonging, and social approval in relation to turnout. These motives have precedents in the literature, but they have not yet been evaluated simultaneously. We find that altruism and duty are the most important reported motives for turnout accounting for more than 60% of the allocations; selfish motives account for only about 15%. Turnout behavior responds positively to the motives of duty, altruism, and belonging, but it is dampened by the motive of selfishness. Turning out to vote emerges as an activity largely shaped by an individual’s social concerns and values.

Highlights

The question, or “puzzle,” of why people vote has been tackled by participation scholars for decades and at length, but in some respects, it remains unsettled.1 As Smets and van Ham (2013) describe, there is an “embarrassment of riches” in the abundance of explanations for why individuals vote
How do citizens themselves explain their motives for voting? How predictive of turnout behavior are each of these reported motives? And, in general, how important are selfish and duty motives, the original proposed drivers, versus social motives? The aim of this study is to provide an empirical assessment of the relative importance and explanatory power of the different posited motives for turnout
If we focus on the responsiveness around the means in each graph, which are the areas where the data are more likely, we see that duty and belonging have a positive influence on frequent turnout, while selfishness and social approval on the other hand reduce turnout chances

Summary

Introduction

The question, or “puzzle,” of why people vote has been tackled by participation scholars for decades and at length, but in some respects, it remains unsettled. As Smets and van Ham (2013) describe, there is an “embarrassment of riches” in the abundance of explanations for why individuals vote. We can conceptualize individual turnout behavior as being shaped by internal and external causes related to motivations, abilities, and barriers to vote (Harder & Krosnick, 2008, p.527). These factors address, respectively, why we vote, how capable we are to vote, and what external forces limit our capacity to vote. Variations in motives reflect psychological traits that are not immediately determined by one’s socioeconomic context.

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