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Voters, dictators, and peons: expressive voting and pivotality

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Abstract

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.

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Notes

  1. The possibility that individuals vote in accordance with their individual notions of justice would also account for the fact that many wealthy people vote for redistributive policies.

  2. Parameter p still may influence behavior under the social preferences model, depending on how one models the noise in voters’ behavior. For example, it could be that a higher p leads to fewer “errors” and thus makes behavior more sensitive to both ideology and monetary interests.

  3. There is also a small literature that examines correlations between voting and other expressive behaviors, finding that voters are not only more likely to wear political buttons and place political signs in front of their houses (Copeland and Laband 2002), but also more likely to post signs supporting their local football team (Laband et al. 2008).

  4. Under a simple modification of a model from Mueller (1989), Sobel and Wagner (2004) derive this probability to be \(\frac {3}{\sqrt{2 ( 2\pi( n-1 ) ) }}\) where n is the number of voters.

  5. In addition, Fischer (1996) incorrectly computes the probabilities of being pivotal; in the condition where a subject’s name is drawn at random and then his or her decision is implemented for certain, his analysis codes the probability of being pivotal as equal to 1 even though subjects make their decisions before names are drawn.

  6. Haab et al. (1999), however, argue that this result might reflect only a difference in the variance of responses across the conditions rather than a difference in the average willingness to give.

  7. Feddersen et al.’s results on turnout, i.e., on whether the subjects choose to abstain, are also consistent with expressive voting models.

  8. The recruiting ad said “Participate in an experiment; earn up to $30 an hour”, with a footnote that added “you will get between $5 and $15 for a half-hour experiment”.

  9. Rock-paper-scissors is a game with two players. The players simultaneously choose one of three actions: rock (a clenched fist), paper (an open hand with all fingers extended) or scissors (a hand with index and middle fingers extended and separated). A rock beats scissors; scissors beat paper; paper beats rock. If both players choose the same action, the round is counted as a draw.

  10. In each of the five rounds, the experimenter played the same action (rock, scissors, or paper) against all nine subjects. Consequently, subjects who played similar strategies had similar performance. Our statistical analyses are conducted under the assumption that any common component in subjects’ strategies is orthogonal to their redistributive preferences.

  11. Many subjects, however, especially those who had done well, said they believe that skill played a part in determining performance. We explain below how this belief was elicited.

  12. An alternative design that generates variation in pivotality is to fix a decision-making procedure, but vary the group size. A problem with such a design, however, is that if social preferences depend on the group size, the direct effect of pivotality cannot be established.

  13. Subjects signed up for particular time slots that were randomized to a referendum procedure or a dictatorship procedure. If subject characteristics exist that affect preferences for both time slots and for redistribution, this would lower the true precision of our estimates of the effect of being a voter. This issue does not affect our comparison of dictators and peons, however.

  14. We did not ask this question of the first group of subjects. Hence, data on this question is missing for 9 out of the 459 subjects.

  15. Even countries that impose compulsory voting allow the voters to cast blank ballots.

  16. The correlation between the answers to the two questions is also significant (p<0.001). When answers to both questions are included in the same regression, each has a significant and independent effect (both p-values <0.02).

  17. This relationship is significant (p<0.001). Once we control for views on the motivation of the poor and views on redistributive taxation, however, the impact of the views on the death penalty becomes only marginally significant (p=0.07).

  18. Some readers might object that, since peons were asked what they would do if they were a dictator, they might behave as if they were indeed pivotal. We interpret our results under the assumption that only actual pivotality matters, but readers who disagree are invited to disregard the data on peons; excluding peons from the empirical analysis does not substantively change the conclusions of the paper.

  19. The 95 % confidence interval excludes the possibility that the effect of monetary interest on dictators’ choices is more than 3.2 percentage points greater than on peons’ choices or more than 2.7 percentage points greater than on voters’ choices.

  20. All of the papers above focus on turnout. They are relevant to our setting under the assumption that voters are likely to condition how to vote on the probability that they are pivotal if they condition whether to vote on that probability.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thanks Peter Leeson, Lise Vesterlund, and seminar participants at UCSD, Cornell, University of Chicago, and University of Pittsburgh for helpful comments. This research was supported by the Initiative for Global Markets at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Emir Kamenica

  2. Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, USA

    Louisa Egan Brad

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  1. Emir Kamenica
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Correspondence to Emir Kamenica.

Appendix: The survey

Appendix: The survey

Participant #___

Please circle a number to indicate your position on the following issues.

1. You believe that the death penalty

figure a

2. You view laws that regulate access to guns

figure b

3. You believe that most poor people are poor because

figure c

4. You think the government should

figure d

5. You are

figure e

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Kamenica, E., Egan Brad, L. Voters, dictators, and peons: expressive voting and pivotality. Public Choice 159, 159–176 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-012-0035-9

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