Expressive Voting and Electoral Equilibrium

Geoffrey Brennan and Alan Hamlin

Public Choice, 1998, vol. 95, issue 1-2, 149-75

Abstract: There are two rival accounts of rational voting in the public choice tradition: the mainstream instrumental account, that sees the vote as a revelation of preference over possible electoral outcomes, essentially analogous to a market choice; and the expressive account, that sees the vote as expressing support for one or other electoral options, rather like cheering at a football match. This paper attempts to lay out some of the implications of the expressive account of voting for the issue of who votes as well as for the nature of political equilibrium, and to compare these implications with those derived from the instrumental account. The authors also identify and discuss the alternative views of the domain of electoral politics associated with the instrumental and expressive accounts of voting, and sketch a route towards the integration of expressive and instrumental ideas in the analysis of rational electoral politics. Copyright 1998 by Kluwer Academic Publishers

Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (141)

Downloads: (external link)
http://journals.kluweronline.com/issn/0048-5829/contents link to full text (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Journal Article: Expressive voting and electoral equilibrium (1998)
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:kap:pubcho:v:95:y:1998:i:1-2:p:149-75

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... ce/journal/11127/PS2

Access Statistics for this article

Public Choice is currently edited by WIlliam F. Shughart II

More articles in Public Choice from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().