Affinity, Antipathy and Political Participation: How Our Concern For Others Makes Us Vote

Peter Loewen sends along this article that follows up on some work of James Fowler, Aaron Edlin, Noah Kaplan, and myself on rational voter turnout. He goes with the rational-but-not-entirely-self-interested model that we all use (and which first appeared, as far as we know, in a book by Derek Parfit in 1984), and tests it empirically:

Some citizens differ in their levels of concern for the supporters of various parties. I [Loewen] demonstrate how such concerns can motivate citizens to vote. I first present a simple formal model that incorporates concern for others and election benefits to explain the decision to vote. By predicting substantial turnout, this model overcomes the “paradox of participation”. I then verify the model empirically. I utilize a series dictator games in an online survey of more than 2000 Canadians to measure the concern of individuals for other partisans. I show how the preferences revealed in these games can predict the decision to vote in the face of several conventional controls. Taken together, the formal model and empirical results generate a more fulsome and satisfactory account of the decision to vote than an explanation which relies solely on duty.

The funny thing is, just yesterday I had an email exchange with someone about how to test models of rational voting, and then–hey–I got this email! Cool.

P.S. Loewen’s not using the word “fulsome” the way they taught it to us in high school, but I see that he’s completely consistent with one of the dictionary definitions. Perhaps “fulsome” is one of those words like “inflammable” that you have to ditch because it creates confusion no matter how you use it.

P.P.S. I couldn’t bring myself to read the tables of results. In the next version, I hope there are some clean graphs!

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