Looking for Framing Effects in Expressive Voting Experiments

Experiments have shown that some people behave more altruistically when making collective decisions than they do when making individual ones; this is consistent with theories of expressive voting. However, there is a great deal of variation in the behavior of individual participants in expressive voting experiments. We explore some of the reasons for this variation. We find that certain personal characteristics are sometimes associated with a propensity for expressive voting. However, the strength of these effects is sensitive to the order in which participants make individual and collective choices. One interpretation of the results, which utilizes the concept of cognitive dissonance, is that participants are influenced by a framing effect in which the „warm glow‟ of expressive voting can influence subsequent individual decisions, and the „cold shower‟ of individual selfishness can influence subsequent collective decisions. This suggests a link between quality of formal political institutions and the quality of social capital. JEL classification: A13; C92; D64; PsycINFO classification: 2960