Voting when Money and Morals Conflict: An Experimental Test of Expressive Voting
Preprint
- 1 April 2002
- preprint
- Published by Elsevier BV in SSRN Electronic Journal
Abstract
Moral considerations may matter much in voting because the costs of expressing support for a morally worthy cause may be low in a referendum. These costs depend on whether a voter expects to affect the outcome of the referendum. To test the low-cost theory of expressive voting, we experimentally investigate a proposal to tax everyone and donate tax revenues. The analysis of expectations and voting decisions shows that expressive voting is common. However, the low-cost theory fails to explain voting decisions. Instead of affecting the costs of expressive voting, expectations appear to affect its benefits.Keywords
This publication has 33 references indexed in Scilit:
- Five Rational Actor Accounts of the Welfare StateKyklos, 2001
- Cooperation and noise in public goods experiments: applying the contribution function approachJournal of Public Economics, 2001
- Social Distance and Other-Regarding Behavior in Dictator Games: CommentAmerican Economic Review, 1999
- An experimental test of the crowding out hypothesis: The nature of beneficent behaviorJournal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 1998
- Expressive voting and electoral equilibriumPublic Choice, 1998
- Democracy and DecisionPublished by Cambridge University Press (CUP) ,1993
- Impure Altruism and Donations to Public Goods: A Theory of Warm-Glow GivingThe Economic Journal, 1990
- Expectations and Preferences in Presidential Nominating CampaignsAmerican Political Science Review, 1985
- The Economic Approach to Human BehaviorPublished by University of Chicago Press ,1976
- Studies of independence and conformity: I. A minority of one against a unanimous majority.Psychological Monographs: General and Applied, 1956