2011): “Social Preferences and Political Participation

Models of political participation have begun to incorporate actors who possess ‘‘social preferences.’ ’ However, these models have failed to take into account the potentially incongruent political goals of different social preference types. These goals are likely to play an important role in shaping political behavior. To examine the effect of distinct social preferences on political activity we conducted an experiment in which participants played five rounds of a modified dictator game (Andreoni and Miller 2002). We used the decisions in these games to determine their preference type and mapped these types to reported political activity. Our results show that subjects who were most interested in increasing total welfare in the dictator game were more likely to participate in politics than subjects with selfish preferences, whereas subjects most interested in reducing the difference between their own well-being and the well-being of others were no more likely to participate than subjects with selfish preferences. R ational choice models of political participa-tion based on the assumption that actors are purely self-interested typically fail to explain why so much participation occurs (Fiorina 1990).1 In these models the cost of participation, even if small, typically outweighs the expected personal benefit of participation. If this is the case, we should observe very little political participation, but in fact large numbers of citizens are politically active. Alternative models have begun to incorporate actors who care not only about themselves, but also about the well-being of others. In particular, formal models based on an assumption that actors have ‘‘social preferences’’ have been constructed to explain voting behavio