 Sticky votesJournal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2016, vol. 132, issue PA, 12-25 Abstract: Are vote choices instrumental or expressive? This paper studies the effects of the ban in the Basque Country of a political party, Batasuna, which continued to contest the elections after its ban by calling for a null vote, that has expressive but no instrumental value. Exploiting the heterogeneity in the pre-ban presence of Batasuna and in the enforcement of the ban across municipalities and elections, I find that null voters are two-thirds of the potential Batasuna voters in a regular election, indicating that expressive motivations alone explain two-thirds of the votes for this party. Null votes lower the electoral threshold and raise the instrumental incentives for the remaining voters to vote for smaller parties, but the behavioral effect of the ban on the fragmentation of city councils is close to zero. In a region with salient identity politics, the results are consistent with prevalent expressive voting, in contrast with the common assumption of purely instrumental voters. Keywords: Voting behavior; Expressive voting; Identity voting; Instrumental voting; Political bans (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:132:y:2016:i:pa:p:12-25 DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2016.09.006 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization is currently edited by Houser, D. and Puzzello, D. More articles in Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization from Elsevier |
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