Expressive Voting Research Articles

Are marginals different? Evidence from British elections 1950\u20132015

We analyse the results of British general elections from 1950 to 2015. In our model, voting is both instrumental and expressive, and is driven both by ideology and the perceived valence of different parties. On most assumptions the model predicts that the safer the seat the lower the swing. The exception is where ideological factors are relatively dominant in instrumental voting, and valence factors are relatively dominant in expressive voting. In this case the highest swings might be in the safest seats. Alternatively swing might peak at intermediate majorities, and this is what we find when we look at swings between Conservative and Labour in seats held by one or other of these parties. We also find that marginals behave more distinctively when the national result is expected to be close or when there has been another general election recently; and that at least some voters have a sense of what is a ‘bellwether’ seat i.e. one that would be marginal in a close election. However in those seats where the main contest has been between the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, the swing is positively related to the closeness of the contest.

Expressive voting and political ideology in a laboratory democracy

We test the theory of expressive voting in relation to political ideology in a laboratory experiment. After deriving our hypotheses from a decision theoretic model, we examine voting decisions in an experiment in which we use the size of the electorate as the treatment variable. Using a Heckman selection model that includes both the electoral participation decision and voting choice decision, we find mixed results for the expressive voting hypothesis. In line with expressive voting, our findings suggest that non-ideological voters are more likely to abstain from voting than ideological voters – especially when the electorate grows large. Concerning the voting choice decision between an equal but inefficient, and an unequal but efficient income distribution the evidence for expressive voting is mixed. We do find that voters with socialist (left wing) preferences behave expressively, but we do not find this effect for voters with capitalist (right wing) preferences.

Turnout, Status, and Identity: Mobilizing Latinos to Vote with Group Appeals

The rise of micro-targeting in American elections raises new questions about the effects of identity-based mobilization strategies. In this article, we bring together theories of expressive voting with literature on racial and ethnic identification to argue that prior studies, which have found either weak or null effects of identity messages targeting minority groups, have missed a crucial moderating variable—identity strength—that varies across both individuals and communities. Identity appeals can have powerful effects on turnout, but only when they target politicized identities to which individuals hold strong prior attachments. Using two innovative GOTV field experiments that rely on publicly available data as a proxy for identity strength, we show that the effects of both ethnic and national identity appeals among Latinos in California and Texas are conditional on the strength of those identities in different communities and among different Latino subgroups.

Sticky votes

Are vote choices instrumental or expressive? This paper studies the effects of the ban in the Basque Country of a political party, Batasuna, which continued to contest the elections after its ban by calling for a null vote, that has expressive but no instrumental value. Exploiting the heterogeneity in the pre-ban presence of Batasuna and in the enforcement of the ban across municipalities and elections, I find that null voters are two-thirds of the potential Batasuna voters in a regular election, indicating that expressive motivations alone explain two-thirds of the votes for this party. Null votes lower the electoral threshold and raise the instrumental incentives for the remaining voters to vote for smaller parties, but the behavioral effect of the ban on the fragmentation of city councils is close to zero. In a region with salient identity politics, the results are consistent with prevalent expressive voting, in contrast with the common assumption of purely instrumental voters.

Expressive voting and two-dimensional political competition: an application to law and order policy by New Labour in the UK

There has been much debate regarding the electoral strategy adopted by New Labour in the lead-up to and then during their time in government. This paper addresses the issue from the perspective of left/right and liberal/authoritarian considerations by examining data on individual attitudes from the British Social Attitudes survey between 1986 and 2009. The analysis indicates that New Labour’s move towards the right on economic and public policy was the main driver towards attracting new centrist voters and could thus be labelled ‘broadly’ populist. The move towards a tougher stance on law and order was more ‘narrowly’ populist in that it was used more to minimise the reduction in support from Labour’s traditional base on the left than to attract new votes. The evidence presented provides support for an expressive theory of voting in that law and order policy was arguably used to counter alienation amongst traditional, left-wing Labour supporters.

Higher costs appeal to voters: implications of expressive voting

The logic of expressive voting implies that some will find voting for a government policy more appealing the more costly it is. This result is consistent with public opinion polls and the trajectory of government spending. And it adds to the ability of rational voter ignorance and apathy to explain the latitude politicians have to ignore the cost they impose on taxpayers without losing votes. The appeal of higher costs to voters makes it easier for organized-interest groups to exploit the good intentions of voters by capturing private advantage and sabotaging the hopes upon which those good intentions are based. The appeal higher costs have for some voters also suggests another way bootleggers can benefit from the moral cover Baptists provide for their rent-seeking activities. We also point out that expressive voting implies that there is no reason for believing that the special-interest activity that sabotages the moral intentions of voters are in general any less moral than morally motivated voters.

Why Any Seatbelt Mandate is an Infinitely Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma: A Health Economics Perspective

Among the most controversial of public health measures are those that restrict people’s freedom of choice presumably for the purpose of protecting their own health and safety. Mandatory use of automobile seatbelts can inspire allusions to the “tyranny of health” and the ‘health police.” This study revisits state seatbelt legislation, which is in force in all but one state of the USA. In modeling seatbelt mandates as indefinitely repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma (PD) games, the study qualifies and overcomes the limitations of conventional interest group and expressive voting theories. It indicates why and how utility-maximizing players, particularly carmakers, insurance companies, consumer advocates and regulators, may choose to cooperate, even in instances where mutual defection would bring each of them higher payoffs. The study suggests why state seatbelt mandates endure, despite ongoing concerns that they undermine individual autonomy or that their social costs outweigh the benefits of law-enforcement. The evolution and mediating effects of reputation and reciprocity in otherwise highly contestable healthcare decisions are consequently explored. Finally, the study identifies the implications of indefinitely repeated games on the continuing nature of strategic relationships and for mitigating conflict over traffic safety regulation, regardless of time and place.

Expressive Voting and Political Ideology in a Laboratory Democracy

We test the theory of expressive voting in relation to political ideology in a laboratory experiment. After deriving our hypotheses from a decision theoretic model, we examine voting decisions in an experiment in which we use the size of the electorate as the treatment variable. Using a Heckman selection model that includes both the electoral participation decision and voting choice decision, we find mixed results for the expressive voting hypothesis. In line with expressive voting, our findings suggest that non-ideological voters are more likely to abstain from voting than ideological voters – especially when the electorate grows large. Concerning the voting choice decision between an equal but inefficient, and an unequal but efficient income distribution the evidence for expressive voting is mixed. We do find that voters with socialist (left wing) preferences behave expressively, but we do not find this effect for voters with capitalist preferences.

Warm glow of giving collectively – An experimental study

We report on an experiment to test for a warm glow of giving collectively. Comparing subjects’ affective state before and after the experiment, we find that individual charitable donations create a feeling of warm glow while collective donations do not. Proposing to donate the full endowment collectively improves subjects’ affective state significantly, though the behavioral data suggests that this result cannot be explained by the notion of expressive voting. We also find that subjects who consider Kant’s Categorical Imperative to be an important guideline for individual decisions are more likely to donate the full endowment to charity. This result supports the notion of Kantian thinking as an independent factor explaining cooperative behavior (Roemer, 2014).

The beast is not easily starved

Public choice insights, with an emphasis on expressive voting, provide support for the empirical findings that starving the beast is not an effective way of reducing government. The key implication behind that theoretical support is that political ideology trumps narrowly defined self-interest in influencing voting decisions.

Social Preferences Under Risk and Expressive Voting in Large Elections

We propose a foundation for expressive voting that is based on a novel theory of social preferences under risk. Under our proposal, expressive considerations in voting endogenously arise from the particular way in which risky social prospects are assessed. To motivate this connection, we relate expressive voting to evidence on prosocial behavior under risk. We then illustrate the scope of our framework by using it to address some key questions in the literature: why, for expressive considerations, might voters vote against their self-interest in large elections and why might such elections exhibit a moral bias (Feddersen et al. 2009). Specifically, we consider an electoral set-up with two alternatives and explain why, when the size of the electorate is large, voters may want to vote for the alternative they deem morally superior even if this alternative happens to be strictly less preferred, in an all-inclusive sense, than the other.

Strategic and expressive voting

Critics of the expressive account of voting have argued that it is inconsistent with strategic voting. Since there is strong evidence that people vote strategically, this has been taken to show that many voters are at least partially instrumentally motivated. This paper argues that strategic voting in the relevant sense is consistent with entirely expressive political motivation. Building on an earlier suggestion by Geoffrey Brennan, I model voters as expressively valuing ideological position as well as the strategic pursuit of expressively-defined preferences. This model predicts strategic voting without instrumental preferences entering the voter’s calculus at all. I also suggest that expressive preferences for strategic behaviour can be usefully analysed in terms of dispositional choice.

WHO VOTES EXPRESSIVELY, AND WHY? EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE

ABSTRACTExperiments have shown that some people behave more altruistically in collective decisions than they do in individual ones, which could be interpreted as an ‘expressive voting’ effect. However, there is substantial variation in the behaviour of experimental participants. We conduct experiments to explore the reasons for this variation, and find that certain characteristics are sometimes associated with a propensity for expressive voting. However, the strength of these effects depends on the ordering of individual and collective choices. The ‘warm glow’ of expressive voting can influence subsequent individual decisions, and the ‘cold shower’ of individual selfishness can influence subsequent collective decisions.

Party-Crashers or Wallflowers: Costly Voting in Elections with Differing Primary Types

We use voting experiments to examine the effects of different primary types on voter turnout, voter choice and election outcomes. We use monetary incentives to induce our participants’ preferences for candidate and party, eliminating the incentive for expressive voting, allowing us to focus purely on the instrumental aspects of voting. We vary the cost of voting and observe how differing costs impact turnout, choice and outcomes. We use three basic primary types: closed, semi-closed and open. We find that increasing the cost of voting decreases turnout and strategic voting; that only a small proportion of voters vote strategically; that primary type affects turnout in both the primary and general elections; and that primary type does not impact election outcomes.

The neuroeconomics of voting: Neural evidence of different sources of utility in voting.

Which motives drive the decision of a voter to approve or reject a policy proposal? The Public Choice literature distinguishes between instrumental and expressive voting motives. We investigated the importance of these motives by analyzing the patterns of neural activity in different voting situations. We conducted a functional magnetic resonance imaging experiment that investigates neural activation at the moment of voting and used the altruism scale proposed by Tankersley, Stowe, and Huettell (2007) to differentiate between altruists and nonaltruists. Nonaltruists showed neural activation patterns that were consistent with expressive voting motives. Among nonaltruists, we also observed activation patterns that point at egoistic instrumental motives. Both results are in line with the corresponding Public Choice literature. On the other hand, we found no evidence for expressive voting motives among altruists. Their neural activation pattern was generally much less conclusive with respect to the underlying motives.

Buchanan and Tullock ignore their own contributions to expressive voting

It is common to employ small-number voting models to show how majority voting can lead to outcomes that are often at variance to what most people expect. For example, when government projects are voted on separately, and logrolling and side payment agreements are ruled out, each project can capture a majority vote even though all voters would be better off if none of the projects passed. The outcomes are typically driven by the assumption that the decision of each voter is influenced entirely by effect of their vote on their personal financial interests. But this is misleading since the financial interests of voters have little, if any, influence on how people vote when the number of voters is large. The same outcomes may be realized when there are a large number of voters, but they are likely to differ even though the distribution of financial interests is the same for the large group as it is for the small group. As indicated in the opening paragraph, we ignore the obvious way the outcome of a large-number election can differ from that of a small-number elections, by assuming the distribution of financial interests are the same in both cases, and by assuming away logrolling arrangements that can more easily be reached and enforced in the latter case than the former. Our explanation for the misleading nature of small-number voting models centers on the implications of what has become known as expressive voting, which imply that in large-number

Strategic Voting and Happiness

In this paper we extend the research on happiness and spatial theory of voting by exploring whether strategic and sincere voting affect subjective well-being. We conduct the analysis with data on a large sample of individuals over 50 elections in 16 OECD countries. The results of the analysis show the existence of a negative effect of strategic voting on subjective well-being. In addition, the likelihood of being satisfied decreases when individuals vote strategically for a political party that wins the electoral race. Furthermore, when we analyse separately left-wing and right-wing voters, we find that the described effect holds for left-wing voters but no for right-wing voters. We discuss this evidence in the light of expressive voting theory (Hilman, 2010) and lack of empathy with future selves (Kahneman and Thaler, 1991). Our results are robust to different measures of strategic voting and subjective well-being.

Risks, Responsibility and Public Respect: Cases of Entrepreneurs Elected in the USA and Russia

Adam Smith pointed out public respect, prestige as significant component of compensation some employment (honorableness ... of employment). We assumed, the public moral sanction on success (Weber), public demand for self-made man should correlate positively with number of businessmen elected (US Senators, Russian governors and State Duma Deputies). Expressive voting of this sort could support positive pro-market patterns (create positive externalities) - contrary to the expressive policy (behavior) trap (Hillman, 2010). During the USA classical period (First 150 years M. Friedman recommended to take as a model for underdeveloped countries), successful entrepreneurs enjoyed obvious advantages in elections. The same was true for outstanding military-men, for civilian experienced in combat and decorated with awards it also greatly improved their chances to be elected. To hold military heroes in public respect was equivalent of public demand for more quality pure public good defense provision. Arising of leftist parties and coalitions, standing for mixed public goods priority provision, accompanied by sensible changes in public respect distribution. Lawyers, businessmen and army officers (military heroes) are crowded out by public servants, social activists, public school teachers since Universal Suffrage institution introduction. In Russia, entrepreneurial status, especially a successful entrepreneurs status, is accompanied by no tangible public recognition. However, the self-esteem of individuals employed in business remains relatively high. The officers ahead start was almost unobservable in Russia after very first elections. With our data we also found that economic freedom indicators associated with greater prestige of entrepreneurs within society are positively correlated with voting for pro-market parties and negatively correlated with voting for left.

Voters, dictators, and peons: expressive voting and pivotality

Why do the poor vote against redistribution? We examine one explanation experimentally, namely that individuals gain direct expressive utility from voting in accordance with their ideology and understand that they are unlikely to be pivotal; hence, their expressive utility, even if arbitrarily small, determines their voting behavior. In contrast with a basic prediction of this model, we find that the probability of being pivotal does not affect the impact of monetary interest on whether a subject votes for redistribution.

Social information and bandwagon behavior in voting: An economic experiment

We present the first economic experiment on bandwagon behavior in voting. Subjects are given an individual endowment and vote by majority rule to either keep the endowment for private use or to donate it to a non-governmental organization. In our experiment, participants are divided at random in two treatments. Individuals in both treatments are provided with true yet diverging information regarding the approval rates observed in previous experimental sessions. Our results show that the voting behavior differs across treatments in a way that is consistent with bandwagon voting. They also confirm the importance of instrumental motives and – unlike the majority of previous experiments – find support for expressive voting motives. Finally, we assess the impact of the false-consensus effect from a theoretical perspective. We show that it has the potential to change voter behavior if it results from an anchoring bias and voters follow non-instrumental motives.