Patience as a Political Virtue: Delayed Gratification and Turnout

A number of scholars have demonstrated that voter turnout is influenced by the costs of processing information and going to the polls, and the policy benefits associated with the outcome of the election. However, no one has yet noted that the costs of voting are paid on or before Election Day, while policy benefits may not materialize until several days, months, or even years later. Since the costs of voting must be borne before the benefits are realized, people who are more patient should be more willing to vote. We use a “choice game” from experimental economics to estimate individual discount factors which are used to measure patience. We then show that patience significantly increases voter turnout.

Patience as the rational foundation of sociotropic voting

Economic voting is one of the most important mechanisms on explaining voting behavior and on establishing the democratic accountability. However, people tend to use perceived national economic condition on evaluating the incumbent, which is known as sociotropic voting, instead of their pocketbook. Previous studies suggest both altruism and self-interested future expectation may help explain this seemingly irrational behavior, but empirical works have not yet found convincing evidence to prove or disprove the self-interested motivation. This article suggests that patience makes people discount less on the potential future influence of the current national economic change; if self-interest drives sociotropic voting, patient voters would be more sociotropic. Consistent with the hypothesis, individual-level data from 2014 Comparative Congressional Election Survey shows that patient voters rely more on the perceived national economic change to evaluate the incumbent and make vote choice. Limited evidence of the linkage between impatience and pocketbook voting among non-partisans, and on the country-level is also provided.