Rethinking Why People Vote Voting as Dynamic Social Expression

In political science and economics, voting is traditionally conceived as a quasi-rational decision made by self-interested individuals. In these models citizens are seen as weighing the anticipated trouble they must go through in order to cast their votes, against the likelihood that their vote will improve the outcome of an election times the magnitude of that improvement. Of course, these models are problematic because the likelihood of casting the deciding vote is often hopelessly small. In a typical state or national election, a person faces a higher probability of being struck by a car on the way to his or her polling location than of casting the deciding vote. Clearly, traditional models cannot fully explain why and under what conditions citizens tend to vote. In this chapter we will develop a novel framework for understanding why people vote. Instead of conceptualizing voting as a self-interested decision that is made at a single moment in time, we conceptualize voting as self-expressive social behavior that is influenced by events occurring before and after the actual moment of casting a vote. This conceptualization has several benefits. First, it helps to explain existing behavioral research that does not parsimoniously fit within the more traditional models of voting. Second, it helps identify several additional, currently underappreciated, factors that may affect people's likelihoods of voting. These derive from behavioral research in fields that have not previously been linked to voting (notably, social and cognitive psychology and behavioral economics). Our conceptualization is best appreciated when viewed in contrast to traditional accounts of voting behavior. As described above, those conceive of voters as quasi-rational agents who evaluate whether to cast a vote by weighing the expected subjective benefit of voting against the expected subjective cost of voting. Those accounts generally encompass two types of benefits. The first is the impact that one expects her vote to have on the outcome of a given election. This "instrumental" benefit equals the difference in utility that a voter would derive from the preferred candidate versus the alternative candidate winning the election , multiplied by the subjectively assessed likelihood of casting the pivotal vote (Downs, 1957; Tullock, 1968). However, instrumental benefit cannot explain why millions vote in elections that they can reasonably be expected to know are not close. This fact gives rise to a "consumption" benefit from voting (Blais, 2000), which includes the pleasure a person experiences from fulfilling her civic …