The Moral Voter Hypothesis: Economic and Normative Aspects of Public Policy and Law within Democracies

Abstract

This paper develops a model of self-interested norm-driven behavior and uses it to analyze public policy formation within a democracy. If voters are concerned with broad normative issues, politicians will take policy positions in part to advance voter interests in "virtue" or "the public interest" as voters assess it. Consequently, many of the laws adopted within a democracy will advance private normative agendas as understood by pivotal members of the electorate. In this sense, a "public interest" interpretation of at least some government policies is entirely consistent with a rational-choice-based analysis of decision making within a democracy. Many of the positive predictions of the moral voter hypothesis differ from those of narrow self-interested models of policy formation. For example, the model predicts that laws regulating conventional externalities will be more stringent (or less stringent) than can be justified by ordinary economic considerations whenever such laws affect behavior that is relevant for widely held normative theories. Criminal sentences for some crimes in the United States are consistent with the model's implications.