The Psychology of Voting Behavior: A literature review on electoral decision-making factors and processes Submitted by Gabriela Victoria A. Timbancaya 2011-57215 to Dr. Ma. Cecilia Gastardo-Conaco in partial fulfillment of the requirements for Psychology 180: Social Psychology 08 December 2014
A literature review on voting behavior. Done as a requirement for Psych 180 (Social Psychology).
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The Psychology of Voting Behavior:
A literature review on electoral decision-making factors and processes
Submitted by
Gabriela Victoria A. Timbancaya
2011-57215
to
Dr. Ma. Cecilia Gastardo-Conaco
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for Psychology 180: Social Psychology
08 December 2014
The Psychology of Voting Behavior:
A literature review on electoral decision-making factors and processes
There is in place a very hierarchical power structure in every country that is mandated to
govern, that is to make and enact rules and policies that are for the betterment of the welfare of
the general populace. Every few years, there is one day in which ordinary citizens, with no
distinction in class, gender, or race, take part in establishing the people in power for the next
political term. They can reinstate an incumbent or they can elect a newcomer. The assumption of
elections is that those who win the majority vote are in the best position to lead the country. Of
course, the unfortunate reality is that even in large numbers, we are still often unable to make
sound judgments as to who should take up the cudgels of the government. More often than not,
we spend the years of the subsequent term groveling about the performance of the people whom
we had supported fervently in the weeks leading up to the casting of the vote.
To have a better grasp over why this happens to us over and over again, to increase
(however marginally) our chances of making the right choice next time, and to begin opening the
eyes of the rest of our fellow citizens, we must take a close look at electoral behavior. From the
rationale of voting to the models that try to explain how we make our decisions in terms of
certain factors, we will look at the dynamics of the social and the psychological and examine
how they interplay with each other to determine the names we write on the ballots we cast. At
the end of this paper, we shall also examine electoral behavior in the Philippine context.
Why do we vote?
Before we look at how we vote, we must look at why we vote in the first place. Here, we
discuss rational choice theory, voting as a habit, and voting as self-expression.
We vote because it is the rational thing to do
According to Anthony Downs’ rational choice theory outlined in his book An Economic
Theory of Democracy (1957), we make a cost-benefit analysis of whether to vote or not. As
rational actors, we try to maximize utility. This analysis is laid out in an equation:
R = (B)(P) – C + D
where R represents the total reward a person gets from voting, B is the benefit expected to accrue
from the desired outcome (i.e., the person’s candidate actually wins), P is the person’s belief that
his vote will be decisive in the election, C is the personal cost entailed by voting, and D is the
psychological satisfaction the person gets from the act of voting. If a person is rational, which is
assumed by the theory, the more positive the value of R is, the more likely he is to vote (as cited
in Hardner & Krosnick, 2008).
Conventional rational choice wisdom dictates that since the probability that one’s vote
will be decisive in the election is infinitesimal, the value of R in any large-scale election should
be negative, and no one should want to even bother voting. This is because out of millions of
voters, there is very little chance that one person’s vote will change the outcome. Even the
closest races have a margin of a few hundred or thousand votes. One must weigh this tiny
possibility against the real and tangible costs of voting, which includes but is not limited to the
time spent lining up to register as a voter, the money for obtaining forms and documents required
for voting, the opportunity cost in terms of time, money and effort from searching for and
processing information relevant to one’s selection of candidates, and the hassle of the actual
voting process.
Voter turnout is never 100%, but it is much, much higher than rational choice theory
would predict using the aforementioned analysis. Are we then irrational in choosing to vote?
Well, the short answer is no. There is a way to account for this, by modifying the rational
choice theory slightly to include a social motivation for voting. Rational choice models often
have the assumption that a voter operates on selfish preferences. But voting can be rational in
cases where the person cares about other people when he votes, in which case he employs social
preferences. Here B, or the benefit expected to accrue, is constituted by the formula
B = Bself + aNBsoc
where the Bself is the expected benefit to the self, a is a discounting factor to represent the ration
of Bsoc to Bself, N is represented by the number of people in the population to be affected, and
Bsoc is the expected benefit to the population. In this case, N is extremely large, enough to offset
the very low P, because the entire population (N) is always bigger than the number of those who
vote, which is the inverse of P (Edlin, Gelman, & Kaplan, 2008).
Citing data from the 2001 British Election Study (University of Essex 2002), Edlin et al.
(2008) share that 25% of respondents voted to get ‘benefits for me and my family’ while 66%
voted to get ‘benefits for groups that people care about like pensioners and the disabled’. The
social-benefit model of rational choice theory posits that people make vote choices based on
social goods and not selfish benefits. It seeks to answer the question of why people still vote
even when it seems like the trouble of voting is not worth it. For selfish voters, the higher the
turnout, the less benefit they get from voting. In large elections, voting is not worth it. As for
social voters, they incur a benefit no matter what the turnout is (Edlin et al., 2008).
We vote out of habit
Voting once increases the probability that a person will vote again. According to Melton
(2014), there are two levels of explanation for this. The first is that voting once makes it less
costly to vote in the future because institutional barriers are eased (Melton, 2014). Fewer
requirements are needed to register again, and a person has a better understanding of how the
process of registration and voting works, so there is less cost in terms of seeking information on
which offices to go to, what documents to get, how to locate one’s polling station, even how to
fill out the ballot and cast the vote.
The second explains habitual voting on a psychological level. Voting influences people to
think of themselves more as voters, and to think of the act of voting as “something that people
like me do on election day”. By turning out, they increase their feelings of civic-mindedness and
thereby modify their political orientation towards the specific behavior of voting (Melton, 2014).
We vote to express ourselves
People go to great lengths to present themselves as a certain kind of person. Image
management is usually associated with social media, because on such platforms we post pictures
and statuses that we believe are consistent with our identity or the identity we want to project.
However, self-expression goes further than Instagram posts, Starbucks shots, selfies, and the
like. Self-expression also happens in the precincts.
We are motivated to behave in ways that affirm our identity with a group, experiencing
cognitive dissonance when we act in ways that are inconsistent with our attitudes. The very act
of voting, as well as the candidate or party we vote for, may serve as a signal to ourselves and to
others about who we are as citizens of a country (Rogers, Fox, & Gerber, 2012). If we think that
voting is an act that responsible and concerned citizens engage in, and being a good citizen is an
important part of our identity, we will be motivated to participate and turn out on Election Day.
How do we decide our vote?
Numerous models have been constructed in the hopes of explaining why we vote the way
we do. There are three main schools of thought, namely the sociological or Columbia model, the
psychological or Michigan model, and the rational choice or Downsian model. Here we shall
look at the three, and discuss one other model, the heuristic-systematic model, which uses
psychological mechanisms to explain electoral behavior.
The sociological model
Also called the Columbia model (after the university from whence came the researchers),
the sociological model of voting behavior was constructed with the intention of studying the
effect of media on voting choice. They had initially thought that decision-making would be
influenced most by personality and exposure to mass media, with emphasis on the latter.
Their findings, published in 1944 in their book The People’s Choice: How the Voter
Makes up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign, showed otherwise. It was the social groups they
belonged to that determined whom they decided to vote (Antunes, 2010; Rosema, 2004). These
groups are fairly homogenous and encourage political conformity (Bartels, 1996). It turns out
that voters are influenced mainly by their social characteristics, and some of these characteristics
are especially telling. Three were found to predict voters’ choices: socioeconomic status,
religious affiliation, and area of residence.
While The People’s Choice showed that certain social characteristics influenced voters,
Voting (1954) explained why this happens. Vote preferences come about because people interact
with those with whom they share political interests and social characteristics, and this arises from
three principles: first, people belong to different groups that have different interests (social
differentiation); second, people inherit political preferences from their families (transmission);
and third, people have frequent contact with people from the same social groups (social and