Who Cares If You Vote? Partisan Pressure and Social Norms of Voting
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Who Cares If You Vote? Partisan Pressure and Social Norms of Voting Edward Fieldhouse1 · David Cutts2 · Jack Bailey1 Accepted: 11 November 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Social norms are important in explaining why people vote, but where do those norms come from and is social pressure motivated by partisanship? In this article, we use political discussion network data to examine the role of party identification in shaping the relationship between injunctive norms, civic duty and voter turnout. More specifically, we examine the extent to which both the application of injunctive norms and their impact on turnout is affected by shared partisan identification. We find that citizens are more likely to perceive normative pressure to vote from fellow partisans, a phenomenon we refer to as “partisan pressure”. However we do not find consistent evidence for the hypothesis that turnout is more closely related to the approval or disapproval of discussants who share a partisanship. By separating the role of social pressure from that of normative beliefs we also demonstrate that injunctive norms affect voter turnout both directly and indirectly by increasing civic duty. Keywords Social norms · Voting · Turnout · Partisanship · Political discussion networks · Social influence · Civic duty
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s1110 9-020-09661-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Edward Fieldhouse [email protected] 1
School of Social Sciences, University of Manchester, Humanities Bridgeford Street, Manchester M13 9PL, UK
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School of Government and Society, University of Birmingham, Room 3E15 (East Wing) Muirhead Tower, Edgbaston, Birmingham B15 2TT, UK
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Political Behavior
Introduction Ever since Riker and Ordeshook (1968) added the ‘D-term’ to the calculus of voting, students of voter turnout have looked towards consumption benefits to resolve ‘the paradox of voter turnout’ (Fiorina 1976). While ‘the value of seeing democracy continue’ (Downs 1957) and ‘citizen duty’ (Riker and Ordeshook 1968) play a key role in rational choice theories of voting (Aldrich 1993), Barry (1970) pointed out that this provides a rather unsatisfactory explanation of voter turnout. If all the hard work is done by the ‘D-term’ this simply shifts the question from ‘why do people vote?’ to ‘why do people feel it is a duty to vote?’ Subsequently, considerable amounts of research has focused on the normative belief that it is a civic duty to vote (Blais 2000). Moreover, because the notion of civic duty is rooted in the concept of social norms, researchers have sought to understand voter turnout from the perspective of social influence (Abrams et al. 2011; Fieldhouse and Cutts 2018; Knack 1992; Panagopoulos 2010; Rolfe 2012; Sinclair 2012). There is considerable evidence from field experiments of the importance of social pressure—or injunctive norms—in encouraging voter turnout (Gerber et al. 2008; Panag
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