#52: Why Would Anyone vote?

🗳️ Part 2: Interest, social pressure, money, sunshine

Apr 22, 2022

Two weeks ago, I wrote about some of the emotional and more or less rational reasons why we may vote (or not).

I wrote that post, and today’s second part, with run-of-the-mill elections in mind. I’ll add that, when options are baffling, when threats are real, what pushes us to cast a vote (or not) probably has much to do with anger, disgust, and fear. Less so with a hopeful vision for the future, or any joy we might feel during the electoral process.

That said, there’s a good deal of research on practical factors that affect voter turnout, and which might apply in both dire-stakes elections, and in more “regular” circumstances. Let’s look at some of those studies from Canada, France, and the US. May they help us think about our own behaviour and decisions.

1. No need to love politics

You don’t have to be a politics buff to care and to show up. People who say they follow politics because it’s important seem more likely to vote than those who do so because they enjoy it.

In their 2017 book Self-Determination Theory. Basic Psychological Needs in Motivation, Development, and Wellness, Richard Ryan and Edward Deci reference studies of political behaviour in Canada by Losier and Koestner in the late 1990s:

when people follow politics because of having internalized its importance, they are more likely to vote and to feel strongly about issues than people who follow politics simply out of interest. In contrast, those high in intrinsic motivation were indeed interested in the issues and gathered a great deal of information but were less committed to an outcome.

2. Neighbourhood watch

Threatening to name (and shame) non-voters boosts voter turnout—at least it did, and “substantially” so, in a big 2006 field experiment conducted in Michigan and published by Yale researchers.

Eleven days before a statewide primary election, the team sent four different letters conveying rising levels of social pressure to vote—from a simple appeal to civic duty, to a promise to out non-voters to their neighbours1—to about 20,000 households each. Then they compared voting data in those 4 groups with 100,000 households who did not receive a mailing and found robust, additive effects of social pressure: “the more pressure, the more voting, regardless of whether the recipient is predisposed to vote in the first place.”

The researchers warn:

Although we are not advocates of shaming tactics or policies, their cost-effectiveness makes them an inevitable development in political campaign craft, and social scientists have much to learn by studying the consequences of making public acts more public.

black and white rectangular frame — Photo by Tobias Tullius on Unsplash

3. Enough cash

What would happen if we paid people to vote? How much would we need to pay them?

Some (rare) studies show that cash incentives have a limited effect on voter turnout.

Political scientist Costas Panagopoulos, now at Northeastern University in Boston, trialled cash rewards ahead of California elections in 2007 and 2010. (In many other places, that experiment would be illegal!) He found that small rewards ($2) didn’t really raise turnout, and bigger rewards ($10 or $25) did, a little. But even if they work to some extent, cash rewards seem less effective than other interventions.

it would require incentives of $40 to $50 to generate average bumps in turnout that are roughly on par, respectively, with threatening to publicize voters’ failure to vote in the local newspaper […] or a single, heavy-handed, social pressure mailing that discloses voters’ own and their neighbors’ recent voting histories [the Michigan study I describe above]. Offering a $50 incentive to vote would apparently be no more effective, at best and on average, than knocking on someone’s door to encourage them to vote...

4. Rain or shine

We might expect that on a sunny day, voters will rather go fishing than to the polling station. But a 2006 study found the opposite: “rain has a depressing effect on turnout, whereas sunshine and high temperatures incite people to vote.”

Based on voter turnout data in French parliamentary elections between 1986 and 2022, the researchers also found a positive link between turnout and Left vote.

The main implication is that a fine weather favours left-wing parties. Then the Right (Left), when incumbent, would have to choose the election date so that it falls on a bad (good) day. […The] day has to be a worse- than-usual (better-than-usual) one.

Let’s hope for a sunny Sunday.

The first letter opened and closed with “DO YOUR CIVIC DUTY—VOTE!”. This appeal alone raised turnout in this group by 1.8 percentage-points compared to the control group. The second letter added social pressure by opening with: “YOU ARE BEING STUDIED!” and giving brief info about the ongoing study. This increased voter turnout by 2.5 points.

The third letter started with: “WHO VOTES IS PUBLIC INFORMATION!”. It included a list of registered voters at that address and whether they’d voted in previous elections, plus a promise to mail an updated record after the next vote. Showing people their own voting record increased turnout in this group by 4.9 percentage-points compared to the control group.

The fourth letter took the pressure up a notch by asking: “WHAT IF YOUR NEIGHBORS KNEW WHETHER YOU VOTED?” and adding the neighbours’ names and voting records. (Are you sweating yet?) This led to an 8.1-point boost, an effect “not only bigger than any mail effect gauged by a randomized experiment; it exceeds the effect of live phone calls.”

Why Would Anyone