Voting as a rational choice: why and how people vote to improve the well-being of others

Here’s the revised version of our paper on why and how it’s rational to vote, and here’s the abstract:

.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.

What’s cool about the social-benefit model is it not only explains why it is rational to vote (and to participate in politics in other ways, such as by making small contributions to political campaigns) but also makes it clear that, to the extent it is rational to vote, it is rational for the choice of whom to vote for to depend on social rather than selfish preferences.

For more on this and related topics, see these earlier blog entries here, here, and here. And some stuff here on voting and social networks.