What Motivate People to Vote?

What Motivate People to Vote? Voting is often inconvenient, it is personally costly. You have to take time to register and to learn about the candidates, and in the election day you may need to take time of your work to stand in long lines possibly in a bad weather , all that knowing that perhaps your vote will note make a difference among all the millions votes. So why do millions of people expend their own time, energy, and money to cast a vote that will not make any difference in the electoral outcome?

According to The American Psychological Association: Psychologists and political scientist have many theories:Some research suggests that people are motivated to vote because they want to “fit in. ” Bruce Meglino, PhD, of the University of South Carolina’s Moore School of Business, sees voting as an example of a behavior included in social admonitions–things people are supposed to do–such as working hard when no one’s watching or helping a stranger they’ll never see again.

Given that voting is an activity with more costs than benefits for the individual, Meglino thinks that highly rationally self-interested people probably don’t bother to vote. Some people, of course, vote because they believe their vote will make a difference, a psychological mechanism called the “voter’s illusion. ” According to a study published by Melissa Acevedo, PhD, of Westchester Community College, and Joachim Krueger, PhD, of Brown University, in Political Psychology (Vol. 25, No. 1). Basically, people just think their vote makes a difference, and have this mistaken belief even though statistically it’s not the case,” Acevedo says.Voting may be just plain habit for some people, according to Wendy Wood, PhD, a social psychologist at Duke University and co-director of the Social Science Research Institute. Also according to the website “Psychology today”, another reason for voting, offered by political scientists and lay individuals alike: is that it is a civic duty of every citizen in a democratic country to vote in elections.

It’s not about trying to affect the electoral outcome, it’s about doing your duty as a democratic citizen by voting in elections, they believe that voting is not just a responsibility, it is more a source of power. Another reason that people often offer for voting is “But what if everybody thought that way? ”  The reasoning goes that, if everybody thought that voting was irrational and a waste of time, nobody would vote and democracy would collapse. In this last presidential elections, Barack Obama won by 51% verse 48% for Romney.

And according to the exit polls President Barack Obama won the Hipic vote by a whopping margin of 71 percent to 27 percent and the Asians voted for Obama by 73-26. By cons, Romney appear as the candidate for the rich and white people, who wants to lower taxes for millionaires and relax banking regulations for Wall Street that is why he won among all voters making more than $100,000 a year by a margin of 54-44. These statistiques can be explained by the fact that Democrats are multiracial with a laissez faire attitude toward religion and spirituality.

Instead, the Republicans are in general overwhelmingly white and tenaciously Christian; they are more conservative than the Democrats. As stated by The Christian Science Monitor, there are other factors that played a big role in the victory of Obama: Obama and his family remained personally popular. Obama’s status as the first African-American president.

Romney never seemed comfortable discussing his career at Bain or his vast wealth, so he was always seeing as the rich white gay who can not relate to all Americans especially in those tuffs economics times. There is also the part of the role of Charisma. Romney never developed a comfortable style on the stump, in contrast with Obama’s ability to deliver rousing speeches. On the other side, and according to the “New York Times”, there were some social and economics factors that played a role in why people did choose Obama instead of Romney. Like on the matter of health care, Romney’s virulent attacks against the Obama care law, which provides healthcare to all Americans and prohibits insurers from denying coverage to people with pre-existing illnesses, drew alarm bells among most Latinos.

The fact that the world’s biggest industrialized country wasn’t providing health care to 45 million people before Obama’s law was seen by many Latinos as scandalous. Or the fact that Romney’s embrace of the ultra-right wing of the Republican Party, which includes anti-immigration zealots who support show-me-your-papers laws that could turn all Hipics into automatic suspects of being illegally in the country.