Volume 21, Number 3
March 2022
ARTICLE

Voter Motivation

Volume 21, Number 3, March 2022, Pages 299–328
https://doi.org/10.26556/jesp.v21i3.1255
PDFPDF

Abstract

Voters have many motivations. Some vote on the issues. They vote for a candidate because they share that candidate’s policy positions. Some vote on performance. They vote for a candidate because they think that candidate will produce the best outcomes in office. Some vote on group identities. They vote for a candidate because that candidate is connected to their social group. This paper is about these motivations. I address three questions. First, which of these motivations, were it widespread, would be best for intrinsic democratic values? Second, how do the motivations of actual American voters affect the value of American democracy? Third, what motivations should individual American voters have? I argue that widespread issue voting would be best, followed by performance voting, followed by group voting. I argue that American voters do not much contribute to the value of American democracy. Their behavior makes it hard to achieve many democratic values. Finally, I argue that, were America an ideal democracy, American voters would have reason to vote on the issues. But, in their non-ideal democracy, American voters merely have reason to avoid voting on privileged group identities.
Copyright © 2022 Adam Lovett
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.
|

There Is No Institutional Duty to Vote

Jason Brennan and Christopher Freiman

Voting, Representation, and Institutions: A Critique of Elliott’s Duty to Vote

Ben Saunders

News Journalism and the Principles of Objectivity

Dhananjay Jagannathan and Clara Ence Morse

Politics and Foreign Donations

Andreas Bengtson and Dick Timmer

Political Forgetting

Alexander Bryan

Making Sense of Political Normativity

Mike Gadomski

War, Legitimacy, and Democracy: Comments on Renzo

Thomas Christiano

Democracy, Disobedience, and Accountability

Henry Krahn

Refining the Argument from Democracy

Gabe Broughton

The Moral Harms of Homelessness

Bradley Hillier-Smith

The Case for Voting to Change the Outcomes Is Weaker Than It May Seem: A Reply to Zach Barnett

Amir Liron and David Enoch

Agnosticism and Pluralism About Justice

Adam Gjesdal

Portico