Rational Choice and Voter Turnout: Evidence from Union Representation Elections

It is a common observation that many individuals vote despite the fact that, in elections with even a moderate number of voters, the probability their vote will be pivotal is quite small. The theoretical solution of positing that individuals receive utility from the act of voting itself explains why individuals vote, but it leaves open the question of whether or not there is a significant margin of individuals who consider the effect of their vote on the outcome in deciding whether or not to vote. I develop a rational choice model of voting in union representation elections (government supervised secret ballot elections, generally held at the workplace, on the question of whether the workers would like to be represented by a union). These elections provide a particularly good laboratory to study voter behavior because many of the elections have sufficiently few eligible voters that individuals can have a substantial probability of being pivotal. I implement this model empirically using data on over 75,000 of these elections held from 1972-2009. The results suggest that most individuals (over 80 percent) vote in these elections independent of consideration of the likelihood that they will be pivotal. Among the remainder, it appears that 1) the likelihood of voting falls with election size, 2) the likelihood of voting increases with the expected closeness of the election outcome, and 3) the marginal effect of closeness on the likelihood off voting increases in magnitude with election size. While the first two findings are consistent with the standard rational choice model, the third is not. The results suggest that, while these individuals consider first-order variation in the probability that they will be pivotal, they do not carry out a complete calculation of the probability of being pivotal.