Warm glow voting? An analysis of turnout In Portugal

Abstract

Modern democracies rely on civic participation, namely through voting. In this work, I use rational choice theory and the paradox of voting to analyse individuals' voting motivations using data of the Portuguese electorate, collected and built by me (1200 observations). As a novel contribution to the discussion, I conduct a randomized controlled trial using two treatments. One tests the importance of the act of voting while the other tests the probability of being pivotal in an election. I find individuals vote because they value the act of voting – warm glow voting. Finally, I find evidence suggesting that providing information about the importance of voting increases turnout while there is no impact of information about the probability of being pivotal.