Moral Bias in Large Elections

Joint with: Timothy Feddersen and Sean Gailmard

We provide theoretical and empirical support for the claim that large elections may exhibit a moral bias, i.e. alternatives that are understood by voters to be morally superior are likely to be chosen even when a majority of the eligible voters prefer another alternative. Using laboratory experiments we show that ethical expressive voters (voters who receive a payoff from taking an action they believe to be ethical) will have a disproportionate impact on election outcomes for two reasons. First, the choice of how to vote in a large election confronts voters with an essentially hypothetical choice - when ethical expressive types face hypothetical choice situations they are more likely to choose outcomes on the basis of ethical considerations than on the basis of narrow self-interest. Second, as pivot probabilities decline the set of people who participate will increasingly consist of ethical expressives.

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