Expressiveness and Voting

It has been suggested that voting may be an ``expressive''action taken without regard to any hope of actuallyinfluencing election outcomes on the margin. However, therehas been no real-world evidence brought to bear on thequestion of whether the propensity of an individual to voteand the propensity of that same individual to engage in otherforms of ``expressive'' behavior are correlated in anystatistically meaningful sense. Drawing from longitudinal datafound in the National Election Surveys we report compellingevidence of a strong, positive relationship between what weterm ``political expressiveness'' and the act of voting.