Washington U. in St. Louis, Olin Business School, United States
In the United States, people from working-class contexts vote less than their middle-class counterparts. While structural (e.g., difficulty of voting) and individual factors (e.g., political efficacy) contribute to the gap, we adopt a sociocultural perspective and examine class-based differences in how people construe – or make sense of – the duty to vote. We theorize that the default construal of voting duty reflects independent middle-class norms (i.e., a duty to self), which are misaligned with interdependent working-class norms, creating a cultural mismatch. Results from a preregistered survey support the notion that the default conception of voting duty in the US emphasizes independence. Archival analysis documents that class-based differences in duty perceptions predict turnout accounting for individual and structural controls. A second preregistered survey suggests that among individuals from working-class contexts, interdependent reasons for voting are associated with increased perceived duty to vote. Finally, two preregistered experiments test strategies to directly alleviate the cultural mismatch. We find that affirming interdependence and explicitly reframing the duty to vote as interdependent (i.e., a duty to others) increases voting interest among those from working-class contexts without negatively affecting those from middle-class contexts, suggesting that subtle shifts in framing may boost turnout for an underrepresented constituency.
