Voting to Tell Others

Stefano DellaVigna, John List, Ulrike Malmendier and Gautam Rao

Framed Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website

Abstract: 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 'to tell others' of about $15, contributing 2 percentage points to turnout. Lastly, we evaluate a get-out-the-vote intervention in which we tell potential voters that we will ask if they voted.

Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-exp, nep-pol and nep-soc
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (65)

Downloads: (external link)
http://s3.amazonaws.com/fieldexperiments-papers2/papers/00575.pdf

Related works:
Journal Article: Voting to Tell Others (2017)
Working Paper: Voting to Tell Others (2014)
Working Paper: Voting to Tell Others
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:feb:framed:00575

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Framed Field Experiments from The Field Experiments Website
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Francesca Pagnotta ().