Ulric B. and Evelyn L. Bray Social Sciences Seminar

Abstract: We propose a model of costly voting in a canonical spatial setting, where citizens have both expressive and instrumental voting motives. Our main innovation is that citizens also have an aversion to free riding on the costly voting efforts of others. In particular, a citizen incurs a disutility when the benefits from others' voting efforts exceed her net cost of voting, but she, herself, abstains. Such free riding concerns can (i) lead an individual to vote even when her expressive and instrumental benefits are less than her costs, and (ii) open a new, more powerful channel for instrumental motivations to impact voting behavior. We focus on equilibria that are robust to minimal coordination among voters; that is, a marginal expansion of a voting coalition cannot make each new coalition member strictly better off. We establish the existence of such "no marginal expansion" equilibria in general settings. We then derive how the underlying primitives of the electoral environment---e.g., voting costs, elite polarization, and the distributions of voter bliss points---affect equilibrium turnout and turnout rates. Finally, we endogenize platform choices and explore the consequences of these primitives for candidate platforms. Our comparative static predictions find support in the data, and we provide testable insights into how voter motives influence turnout, turnout rates, and candidate platform choices.