Being a voter: developing a survey instrument for expressive voting

It has been argued that expressive motivations are a crucial element in persuading people to vote, overcoming the “paradox of voting” and it has been demonstrated that in experimental situations, subjects behave in a manner consistent with expressive voting. However, there have been limited attempts at operationalizing expressive voting in a survey context and these have been unable to successfully separate the influence of outcome related benefits (instrumental pay-offs) from expressive pay-offs. In this paper, we use a web survey experiment to first identify citizens with a propensity to behave expressively and then assess the validity of the instrument.