Why Do We Vote? So We Can Tell People We Voted

(Photo: Ho John Lee)

We once wrote about reasons to not vote, at least from an economist’s perspective. Since a single vote almost never alters an outcome, what’s in it for the voter?

If a given citizen doesn’t stand a chance of having her vote affect the outcome, why does she bother? In Switzerland, as in the U.S., “there exists a fairly strong social norm that a good citizen should go to the polls,” [Patricia] Funk writes. “As long as poll-voting was the only option, there was an incentive (or pressure) to go to the polls only to be seen handing in the vote. The motivation could be hope for social esteem, benefits from being perceived as a cooperator or just the avoidance of informal sanctions. Since in small communities, people know each other better and gossip about who fulfills civic duties and who doesn’t, the benefits of norm adherence were particularly high in this type of community.”

And, further:

In other words, we do vote out of self-interest – a conclusion that will satisfy economists – but not necessarily the same self-interest as indicated by our actual ballot choice. For all the talk of how people “vote their pocketbooks,” the Swiss study suggests that we may be driven to vote less by a financial incentive than a social one. It may be that the most valuable payoff of voting is simply being seen at the polling place by your friends or co-workers.

The “suggestion” of that Swiss study has now been expanded upon, with experimentation, in a new working paper (abstract; earlier PDF) by Stefano DellaVigna, John List, Ulrike Malmendier, and Gautam Rao, called “Voting to Tell Others.” The abstract:

Why do people vote? We argue that social image plays a significant role in explaining turnout:  people vote 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.  We design a field experiment to estimate the effect of social image concerns on voting.  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. Our estimates suggest significant social image concerns.  For a plausible range of lying costs, we estimate the monetary value of voting “because others will ask” to be in the range of $5-$15 for the 2010 Congressional election.  In a complementary get-out-the-vote experiment, we inform potential voters before the election that we will ask them later whether they voted.  We find suggestive evidence that the treatment increases turnout.

Okay, since we’re in a voting frame of mind, I will ask for your vote:

 [poll id=”24″]