The Competitive Origins of Electoral Participation and Civic Engagement

• In Event: The Psychology of Political Participation

Abstract

Identifying the personal and social drivers of political participation is crucial to understanding the nature of the actors who are involved in democratic elections. Previous research has importantly pointed out a number of personality traits, evocable states, and social characteristics that separate voters from those who don’t fill out a ballot, donors from those who hang on to their money, protesters from those who stay at home, and candidates from those who opt to not contend for office. Although democratic elections are explicitly competitions, no research up to this point has investigated the extent to which competitiveness—or the inclination towards competition— influences any of these critically important democratic behaviors. Drawing upon a literature in psychology that has previously been overlooked by political scientists, I consider the role of two different types of competitiveness: (1) hypercompetitiveness, which is the “drive to win at any cost," and (2) personal development competitiveness, which is a pro-social and more commonly held “drive to compete in order to excel.” Evidence from an experimental game setting that I fielded within a 2024 Bovitz Forthright survey suggests that these competitive typologies are, to some extent, states that can be primed. And that once they are primed in respondents, they can have a meaningful impact on projected political behaviors.

Author

• Ryan DeTamble, Oklahoma State University