Political Animals

Lots more good journalism on voting behaviour coming out these days. Today’s NYT has a summary of some new research showing that voting is a way of signaling a willingness to sacrifice for the common good:

“We started to see that elections function as a kind of SAT score to show what kind of guerrilla you’d be,” Dr. Londregan said. “They’re a way to see how many people would actually fight to oppose a policy — and how much is just bravado.”

And over at MR there is a series of posts on voting as a form of status-seeking, altruism, and coffee-gettting.