Social Voting: How Political Discussion May Improve the Chances of Voting in One's Economic Self-Interest

The extent to which lower-income individuals vote in their economic self-interest matters considerably for building political coalitions and enacting policies that foster egalitarianism and a more representative democracy. If this demographic segment of the population does not vote in its economic interest but votes instead on issues unrelated to its material well-being (i.e. social issues), the result could be greater income inequality, greater political polarization at the elite level (McCarty, Poole and Rosenthal, 2006), and a greater potential - in the extreme - for a plutocracy. In this paper, I examine the factors that lead lower-income individuals to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate in two elections, as Democratic presidents over the last 50 years have done more to serve lower-income individuals than Republican presidents (Bartels, 2008). With the help of new ways of thinking about rational vote choice as a social process (Abrams, Iversen and Soskice, 2008; Iversen and Soskice, 2008), I argue that discussing politics and involvement in an organization meant to organize workers and political interests - labor unions - has mixed results in vote selection. The outlines of the greater argument are clear and well-known. Frank (2005) has made a prominent argument that Republicans have co-opted lower- and middle-income voters through conservative positions on social issues, such as abortion and gay rights. Voters, essentially duped by Republican elected officials who promise piety but rarely deliver actual policy change in those arenas, become half-willing participants in their own economic ruin. Bartels (2008) ﬁnds, however, that Republican identiﬁcation has not dramatically increased in the Midwest, and that real GOP gains among lower-income voters occur in the South, if they happen at all. Nicholson and Segura (2008) also ﬁnd that most voters still view the Democratic party as the one better suited to help the working class. Nevertheless, Bartels (2008) notes that voters often fail to have enough information to link their economic fortune to their political activity. Armed with such information, these Homer Simpson-like, well intentioned but befuddled, characters are more likely to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate. But accessing such information can be difficult in the face of a well-coordinated and consistent messaging campaign on the part of Republicans (Smith, 2007). Downs (1957) understood that “[r]ational citizens in an uncertain world are under great pressure to cut down the quantity of scarce resources they use to obtain political information” and that free information may have “psychological roots in the inquisitiveness of man and his need for personal relationships with others” (220 & 221). Political discussion is one of Downs’s types of “free political information”. Downs also acknowledged what Walsh (2004) later found, that “[m]uch political interaction occurs not among people who make a point to speciﬁcally talk about politics but emerges instead from the social processes of people chatting with one another” (35). Further, Alvarez and Brehm (2002) have found that people who are more informed about politics vote differently than those who are not. And ﬁnally, the lack of information among American voters is well documented (Campbell, Converse, Miller and Stokes, 1960; Lewis-Beck, Jacoby, Norpoth and Weisberg, 2008). Iversen and Soskice (2008) make the connections between Bartels’s work and socio-political behavior, arguing that individuals who discuss politics are more knowledgeable and are therefore better able to link their economic fortunes with their political activity, leading lower- and middle-income voters who discuss politics to vote more often for the left-leaning candidate than their contemporaries who do not.