Voters’ Willingness to Pay for Non-Economic Policy Issues: Pocketbook voting Revisited

A large body of literature assess the question whether voters cast their vote for the party that is closest to their position on social, economic, and political issues. While there is evidence that the fit between voters’ and parties’ political positions is quite well at the macro-level, this does not need to be the case when considering voters individually.
This project contributes to the fundamental question of congruence of vote casting by adopting a self-interest view of voters. We hypothesis that voters cast their vote for parties which maximize their direct utility (prospective pocketbook voting). Given this premise, voters should vote for the party from which they financially benefit the most. As this assessment is quite difficult to make for individuals, we design an online experiment which allows us to randomize access to individualized information on how much respondents’ households would gain financially from parties’ reform plans of the tax and transfer system in Germany. By providing the treatment group with individualized information on how much money they would gain or lose if parties’ were capable to fully implement their desired tax and transfer schedule, we investigate whether the treatment group votes more self-interest driven than a control group without access to this customized information.
In our treatment, we inform voters directly and unequivocally about their financial benefits of voting for the different parties, i.e. eliminating a potential lack of information in the economic domain. At the same time, we will capture respondents’ non-economic policy positions by our survey. Thereby, we will be able to explain (i) whether more information about the financial consequences of vote choices affect voting intentions (i.e. how important the economic domain is for voting decisions), (ii) how much money voters are willing to forego to vote for parties that are closer to their policy positions in the non-economic domain, and (iii) how this voting behavior differs over the left-right scale.
We expect that the information treatment will induce respondents to vote more congruently than is the case in the control group. Furthermore, we expect a substantial heterogeneity in the effectiveness of the intervention. While we suspect that voters of parties that position themselves clearly in the economic domain (e.g. social democrats, liberals, conservatives, and the far-left) will be quite responsive to the information treatment, voters of parties that have a clear profile on policy issues in the non-economic domain (e.g. greens and the far-right) will be less responsive. The results of this study will elucidate on the effectiveness of information campaigns for different types of voters as well as on the willingness to pay of voters to put forward non-economic policy issues.