TY  - JOUR
AU  - Edlin,Aaron
AU  - Gelman,Andrew
AU  - Kaplan,Noah
TI  - Voting as a Rational Choice: Why and How People Vote to Improve the Well-Being of Others
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13562
PY  - 2007
Y2  - October 2007
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13562
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13562.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Aaron Edlin
The Richard W. Jennings '39 Endowed Chair
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Economics and School of Law
Berkeley, CA   94720-7200
Tel: 510/642-4719
Fax: 510/642-3767
E-Mail: edlin@econ.berkeley.edu

Andrew Gelman
Department of Statistics
and Department of Political Science
Columbia University
New York, NY 10027
E-Mail: gelman@stat.columbia.edu

Noah Kaplan
Department of Political Science
University of Houston
E-Mail: nkaplan@uh.edu
AB  - For voters with "social" preferences, the expected utility of voting is approximately independent of the size of the electorate, suggesting that rational voter turnouts can be substantial even in large elections. Less important elections are predicted to have lower turnout, but a feedback mechanism keeps turnout at a reasonable level under a wide range of conditions. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) to show how, for an individual with both selfish and social preferences, the social preferences will dominate and make it rational for a typical person to vote even in large elections;(2) to show that rational socially-motivated voting has a feedback mechanism that stabilizes turnout at reasonable levels (e.g., 50% of the electorate); (3) to link the rational social-utility model of voter turnout with survey findings on socially-motivated vote choice.
ER  -