5 - The Formation of Political Preferences

Summary

The well-established concept of expressive voting concludes that the public policy preferences people express are likely to differ from their instrumental preferences, but the literature on expressive voting has not developed clear conclusions about how people form their expressive preferences. An extensive literature on preference formation helps to answer this question. Because there are no instrumental consequences from the political preferences citizens hold, the utility they get from those preferences comes solely from their having and expressing them. People have a status quo bias, and are prone to value the preferences they have because of the endowment effect. People adopt preferences to minimize cognitive dissonance, and often yield to peer pressure when choosing the public policy preferences they express. There is a bandwagon effect, and people’s policy preferences are affected by the mass media. This chapter goes beyond just saying that expressive preferences differ from instrumental preferences by explaining why they differ.