Rejection-based choices discourage voters from opting out

Abstract

Voter representation is central to democracy, but efforts to assess the will of the voters are challenged by the fact many voters opt out of indicating their preferences. Prevailing accounts propose that such opt-out behavior arises when voters don’t have a preference for one candidate over the others (indifference-based accounts) and/or when they have a preference but are unhappy with their options (alienation-based accounts). Using a novel voting task, we provide evidence for both of these accounts, with alienation playing a dominant role. When participants were asked which of two hypothetical candidates to vote for, they were most likely to opt out of voting when faced with a “lose-lose” choice. We then propose a novel, third account of this phenomenon: that voters opt out of making lose-lose choices because the quality of those options is misaligned with their typical goal of choosing the best candidate. Confirming this, across two experiments we show that participants who are instead asked to reject the worst candidate no longer show increased opt-out behavior when faced with lose-lose choices. We corroborated these findings in two further studies surveying voter preferences between candidates for the 2024 US presidential election. Survey responders who were asked which candidate they would vote for were much more likely to opt out of choosing one of the candidates (indicated that they were undecided) relative to those who were asked which of the candidates they would vote against. By bridging research across psychology and political science, our work provides a deeper understanding of when and why voters are likely to opt out of indicating their preference. Critically, we also provide the first experimental evidence that inverting the goal of voting can better reveal the preference of seemingly undecided voters, particularly in cases where they know which candidates they like least but are unwilling to endorse the one they like most.

Keywords: decision-making, negative voting, voter turnout