title:         Social Preferences and Political Participation
authors:       Christopher Dawes, James Fowler
entrydate:     2006-10-23 10:09:18
keywords:
abstract:      This paper examines the link between social preferences and political activity using experimental methods. We conduct a laboratory experiment in which subjects are asked a series of questions about their past political participation and then are instructed to play five rounds of a modified dictator game (Andreoni and Miller 2002). The results of the dictator game are used to classify each subject’s preferences. We find that subjects who are most interested in increasing total welfare are 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 are no more likely to participate in politics than subjects with selfish preferences.

http://polmeth.wustl.edu/retrieve.php?id=650

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