A great deal of scholarship has explored why some democratic citizens vote while others do
not. This article reviews that literature through a lens presuming that a person's likelihood of …

The paradox between an individual's decisions to head to the polls and the absence of
strictly rational arguments for this action has intrigued–and troubled–many scholars. The …

Why do people vote? We design a field experiment to estimate a model of voting “because
others will ask”. The expectation of being asked motivates turnout if individuals derive pride …

This paper studies, theoretically and empirically, the role of overconfidence in political
behavior. Our model of overconfidence in beliefs predicts that overconfidence leads to …

Can protests cause political change, or are they merely symptoms of underlying shifts in
policy preferences? We address this question by studying the Tea Party movement in the …

The fact that many citizens fail to vote is often cited to motivate others to vote. Psychological
research on descriptive social norms suggests that emphasizing the opposite—that many do …

In the run-up to elections in a large Indian city, residents in a random sample of slums
received newspapers containing report cards on politicians. The report card for a jurisdiction …

We report the results of three experimental tests of the “hot cognition” hypothesis, which
posits that all sociopolitical concepts that have been evaluated in the past are affectively …

Scholars have recently extended the traditional calculus of participation model by adding a
term for benefits to others. We advance this work by distinguishing theoretically a concern for …

We analyze a model of participation in elections in which voting is costly and no vote is
pivotal. Ethical agents are motivated to participate when they determine that agents of their …