A Critique of the Self-Interested Voter Model: The Case of a Local Single Issue Referendum
In recent years, economists have sought to extend the logic of marginal analysis to topics not traditionally considered within the domain of the discipline. Among the areas to which this analysis has been expanded is political behavior under a research program widely known as public choice.1 The empirical tradition of public choice uses the utility maximization behavioral assumption of economic theory to construct and estimate models of voting behavior [Mueller 1989; Mitchell 1990]. At the conceptual level, this assumption permits inclusion of direct self-interest, altruism, and community duty in explanations of decisions on whether and how to vote. However, predictive empirical models of voter choice typically specify an individual's utility function solely in terms of direct self-interest [Feldman 1984, 229]. Within the empirical public choice literature, direct tests of the self-interested voter assumption have been hampered by two data problems. First, while hypotheses are about motivations and responses of individual voters, the data available is usually aggregate census data or voting precinct data. The problems of using aggregate data in testing hypotheses about individual voter decision making have been noted in several studies [Deacon and