Time Discounting in Political Behavior: Delayed Gratification Predicts Voter Turnout.

Recent GOTV experiments suggest that the decision to vote involves an intertemporal trade-off. Whereas the transaction costs of voting are incurred on or before Election Day, its expressive benefits are realized in the future. In this article, I draw on a vast literature in psychology and economics to propose a model and a measure of time discounting in political behavior. The ability to delay gratification predicts a myriad of desirable outcomes, including voter turnout. My model posits that it enhances the effects of political stimuli such as social norms when the rewards are deferred. As a result, more patient individuals are more likely to vote, and to lie afterwards if they do not vote. In the empirical analysis, I use an incentivized measure from a representative US panel (N=3,027). My results show that the effect of patience on self-reported turnout is robust to demographic controls, risk aversion, and measurement error. I leverage novel estimation techniques to demonstrate that monetary delay-discounting experiments provide reliable elicitations of time preferences that map onto political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]