The Common Good and Voter Polarization

Abstract

Do voters see democracy entirely in spatial terms, as a tradeoff of conflicting interests, or do they also view it as a search for the “common good”, as some democracy theorists have long conjectured? We develop a model in which voters have preferences over both common-good and spatial payoffs, and provide a novel method to disentangle the two. Estimating the model on California ballot propositions from 1986 to 2020, we find that 74% of voters placed significant weight on the common good and that partisan polarization roughly doubled over the time period, mainly due to Democrats drifting left.