Why do the poor vote against redistribution? We experimentally examine one explanation, namely that individuals gain direct expressive utility from voting in accordance with their ideology and understand they are unlikely to be pivotal; hence, their expressive utility, even if arbitrarily small, entirely determines their voting behavior. In contrast with a basic prediction of this explanation, we …nd that the probability of being pivotal does not a¤ect the impact of monetary interest on whether a subject votes for redistribution.

Social scientists have long speculated about individuals ’ tendencies to manipulate elections by misrepresenting their preferences. The fact that preference orderings are generally unobserved, however, has made it very difficult to document strategic behavior empirically. Exploiting the incentive structure of Germany’s voting system to solve the fundamental identification problem, this paper estimates the extent of strategic voting in large, real-world elections. Evidence from reduced form as well as structural methods indicates that almost one third of voters abandons their most preferred candidate if she is not in contention for victory. As predicted by theory, tactical behavior has a non-trivial impact on individual races. Yet, as one aggregates across districts, these distortions partially offset each other, resulting in considerably more modest effects on the overall distribution of seats. I am especially grateful to Gary Becker, Roland Fryer, Steven Levitt, and Roger Myerson for many helpful