A sociocultural approach to voting: Construing voting as a duty to others predicts political interest and engagement

Abstract

A representative democracy requires citizens to be politically engaged; however, a substantial portion of eligible United States voters do not vote. While structural (e.g., ease or difficulty of voting) and individual (e.g., political efficacy, civic knowledge) factors contribute to (a lack of) turnout, the present work adopts a sociocultural perspective to investigate an additional contributor: how people construe—or make sense of—the duty to vote. We examine whether, and for whom, construing voting as interdependent (i.e., voting as a duty to others), compared to independent (i.e., voting as a duty to self), is associated with increased perceived duty and political engagement. Archival analysis ( n = 10,185) documents how perceived duty to vote relates to voter turnout in a nationally representative sample of Americans (Study 1). Two preregistered studies (total n = 1,256) provide evidence that naturalistically construing one’s duty to vote as interdependent (Study 2) and experimentally reflecting on interdependence (Study 3) both predict increases in perceived voting duty. Perceived duty to vote, in turn, is associated with heightened political engagement intentions. Taken together, the present work suggests that how voting is construed—as an independent duty to the self or an interdependent duty to others—may meaningfully influence political engagement, with implications for voter turnout interventions.