Signaling Goodness: Social Rules and Public Choice

4. Political Charity

CHAPTER 4 Political Charity In the last chapter we developed a reputational theory ofcharity, a theory about any prosocial behavior that has costs to the individual so engaged. Voter participation and commonly defined charity qualify as such behavior. The former has time costs and is regarded as having favorable social consequences. There is a positive externality from either being a voter or being the sort of person who would vote. The willingness to accept the legitimacy of democratic government policy with which one disagrees is an important component of social harmony , and one fostered by high voter participation. There is some evidence for this contention. In addition to self-serving "get out the vote" drives of political parties and their allies, there are frequent public service announcements from neutral sources such as the Advertising Council,I and some polities tax the act of not voting. Because the participation occurs so infrequently, some might regard voter participation as a poor vessel for signaling reputation. But the resulting reduction in returns is matched by a similar reduction in costs. Many give infrequently to specific charities. A person cumulates a reputation for trustworthiness by many prosocial acts, one of which could well be voter participation. There is a more serious objection to voter participation as a signaling device: the limited information that others have about whether an individual voted or not. There is very little direct observation of an individual by others whose good opinion matters to that individual. In the last chapter, we saw, however, that people can get information about voting participation from individuals stating that they voted. In spite of the substantial lying from those who so state, the probability that a person actually voted is increased by his saying that he voted. Even so, information is scarce. A similar problem exists for charity. We hypothesized that our theory 's successful predictions in that case were the result of a combination of actual reputational signals and conscience, and the latter we argued in the last chapter is positively related to reputational variables. 58 Political Charity 59 We use the same argument here, though it well might be that there is less information about voter participation than charity. There certainly is less information from direct observation, though the taboo on bragging about one's charity, discussed in chapter 3, does not hold with equal force for statements about voting. In any case, the a priori case for predicting voter participation through reputational variables is highly dependent on conscience being thus predictable. The literature has long recognized some obvious features of voting behavior: (r) Any single person's vote has virtually no impact on an election; (2) people vote anyhow; and (3) the only way this seeming paradox can be resolved is by the existence of some private return to voting rather than a return from influencing the outcome of an election . The private return we propose is dominantly a conscience return with probably a little reputational signaling as well. Who Is More Likely to Vote? Reputation variables in part determine voting participation whether motivated directly by reputation or indirectly by conscience. Hence, the same variables that determine charitable contributions determine voting participation. In chapter 3 we made four predictions. Now, all we have to do is substitute the word voting for charity. (r) We predict that the more people one knows, the more likely he will be to vote. The more people one has known in the past, the more one will have developed a conscience. (2) Since the returns to trustworthy behavior are delayed returns~future reciprocity gains~those with lower rates of time preference have more to gain by signaling trustworthiness. As developed in chapter 3, that implies, that those with a lower rate of time preference in the past would have developed more of a conscience applicable to behavior about which others know little. Those with greater education and steeper age-earnings profiles will tend to have lower rates oftime preference. (3) People with greater incomes or greater assets will also have lower rates of time preference. In addition they will tend to have greater reciprocity gains in dollar terms simply because they deal with greater-valued transactions. Because income levels have some stability over time, these groups will also have more to gain in the past from developing a conscience, which as a by-product leads to more frequent voting. However, the cost of voting~the value of time-also increases with an important component of income...