Pro-Democratic Effort – Study 2

Democracies depend on citizens' willingness to invest effort in civic practices such as staying informed, registering to vote, or participating in elections. They also depend on constructive engagement across different viewpoints, demanding efforts particularly in times of increasing partisan divides and affective polarisation. Recent advances in computational neuroscience provide tools to study how individuals allocate effort in prosocial and collective contexts. Building on these developments, we have recently investigated people's willingness to engage in effortful behaviour that supports democratic engagement, even when such efforts benefit communities or regions whose increased voter turnout might not favour their preferred political party. As expected, we found that while participants were equally willing to work for their ingroup and for everyone, they were significantly less willing to exert effort selectively for regions in which the out-party performs better. Surprisingly though, participants were on average still very much willing to exert effort to increase voter turnout in all conditions, doing so in over 60 percent of trials, even when the out-party profits more. However, many partisans are likely to underestimate this willingness in their political opponents to contribute to shared democratic goods. For example, Democrats may believe that Republicans would rarely make efforts to increase voter turnout in urban areas — as doing so might primarily benefit Democrats — and vice versa, Republicans may assume that Democrats would not support voter engagement in rural areas. Such misperceptions may become self-fulfilling, reinforcing expectations of partisan divides, and reduce bipartisan cooperation and willingness to make efforts with collective democratic benefits. In this project, we therefore aim to correct participants' misperceptions about the out-party's willingness to support democratic engagement across party lines. Specifically, by presenting accurate information that members of the opposing party (e.g., Republicans) are often willing to exert effort to increase voter turnout in areas that primarily benefit the participant's own party (e.g., urban areas favouring Democrats), we expect participants themselves to also become more willing to support democratic engagement in regions that primarily benefit their opposing party.