Voters, dictators, and peons: expressive voting and pivotality

Emir Kamenica () and Louisa Egan Brad ()

Public Choice, 2014, vol. 159, issue 1, 159-176

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. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014

Keywords: Redistribution; Ideology; Expressive voting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

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DOI: 10.1007/s11127-012-0035-9

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