Voting to Tell Others∗

Why do people vote? We design a field experiment to estimate a model of voting ‘because others will ask’. The expectation of being asked motivates turnout if individuals derive pride from telling others that they voted, or feel shame from admitting that they did not vote, provided that lying is costly. In a door-to-door survey about election turnout, we experimentally vary (i) the informational content and use of a flyer pre-announcing the survey, (ii) the duration and payment for the survey, and (iii) the incentives to lie about past voting. The experimental results indicate significant social image concerns. For the 2010 Congressional election, we estimate a value of voting ‘because others will ask’ of $5-$15, one of the first estimates of the value of voting in the literature. ∗We thank Nageeb Ali, Leonardo Bursztyn, David Card, Raj Chetty, Justin Fox, Andrew Gelman, Alan Gerber, Yosh Halberstam, Mitch Hoffman, Greg Huber, Tom Palfrey, Ricardo Perez-Truglia, Todd Rogers, Glen Weyl, Noam Yuchtman, audiences at Berkeley, Boston University, Harvard, Microsoft Research, RAND, Stanford, Toulouse, UCSD, and at the 2011 ESA World Congress (Chicago), the 2012 North-American ESA Tuscon Conference, the 2012 NBER Political Economy Summer Institute, the 2013 Yale CSAP summer workshop, and the 2013 SITE Psychology and Economics conference for helpful comments. We also thank Alec Brandon, Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch, Sheng Li, David Novgorodsky, Jessica Shui, and Vera te Velde for excellent research assistance.