Dark Side Of The Ballot Box? New Research Links Voting To Envy

Voting Doesn’t Make Us Better People. It Might Make Us Pettier

Most of us carry a quiet faith that voting brings out something decent in people, that marking a ballot connects us to something larger than ourselves and nudges us toward fairness. A new study puts that assumption to the test, and the results are not reassuring. When people vote as part of a group, they become significantly more likely to make spiteful choices, ones that close the gap between themselves and someone better off, even when doing so reduces the total amount of money available to everyone involved.

Researchers ran two experiments with a total of 1,750 participants to see whether voting changes how people decide to split money. It did, but not in a flattering direction. The study, published in the journal European Economic Review, argues that diffusion of responsibility, the tendency for individuals to feel less personally accountable when a decision is shared among many people, may help explain the shift.

Shared Responsibility Appears to Loosen the Brakes on Envy

Participants in both experiments were asked to choose between two ways of splitting money with an anonymous partner. In what researchers called the “envy game,” the partner was always going to receive more money than the participant. Participants could either accept that unequal arrangement or choose a perfectly equal split, which meant the partner got less. Choosing equality here was not generous. It was a deliberate choice to pull the other person down, even though it shrank the total pot.

Study 1 recruited 574 undergraduate students at a Swedish university. They made these choices either alone or as part of a majority vote among groups of 49 people. Researchers chose that group size deliberately to reflect real-world elections, where an individual vote rarely decides anything. Study 2 brought in a larger and more diverse group of 1,176 English-speaking participants online and added a third setup, where one randomly picked person’s choice was applied to the whole group instead of a vote. That let researchers separate the effect of simply being in a group from the effect of majority voting specifically, and the results lined up with the diffusion-of-responsibility idea, though they can’t prove participants consciously felt less accountable.

Envy-Driven Choices Rose by Roughly 10 Points Under Voting

In Study 1, about 41% of participants chose the envious, equalizing option when deciding alone. That number climbed to about 50% when they voted as part of a group, a gap of nearly 10 percentage points. Study 2 repeated the experiment with a fresh, larger sample and, unlike Study 1, was formally pre-registered before data collection began, meaning researchers committed to their methods and hypotheses in advance to prevent selectively reporting favorable results. The pattern held up almost exactly: about 57% of solo decision-makers chose the envious option, compared to roughly 68% of voters, again a gap of about 11 percentage points.

In the random-selection condition, about 62% chose the envious option, landing between the solo and voting numbers and pointing to majority rule as an extra push beyond just being in a group.

Researchers also tested what happened when the cost of choosing equality was tiny. Voting still pushed people toward envy. But when pulling the other person down came at a steep price to the participant too, that voting effect shrank and was no longer reliable enough to call a real pattern.

Voting did not make people more generous in scenarios where they had the advantage. Its influence was specific to situations involving disadvantageous inequality, where someone else was ahead.

Political Ideology Did Not Reliably Change the Effect

Participants completed a survey measuring where they fell on a scale from individualist, favoring personal freedom and limited government, to collectivist, favoring community and shared responsibility. Descriptively, collectivist participants showed a bigger jump in envy-driven behavior when voting compared to deciding alone, an ironic pattern given that collectivists tend to express support for policies that benefit communities broadly. But when researchers ran formal statistical tests, this difference did not hold up reliably in either study. The envy-boosting effect of voting appeared broadly consistent regardless of political ideology, though the researchers acknowledge more work is needed to confirm that.

Women were more likely than men to choose the envious, equalizing option across both studies. Researchers note this appeared to be driven more by aversion to being at a disadvantage than by a broader concern for fairness.

Economists have long tried to explain why democracies sometimes redistribute less than standard models predict. The researchers suggest that concerns about relative standing, and the way responsibility is shared when people vote, could be one piece of that puzzle. In these experiments, when responsibility was spread across a large group, participants leaned harder into competitive impulses rather than cooperative ones.

It’s worth being precise about what these games measured. Participants were splitting money in a lab or online setting, not casting real ballots on taxes or welfare policy. As the paper puts it, “when responsibility is shared, voters may be more inclined to endorse choices that prioritize relative standing over collective welfare.” Democracy remains worth defending, but the experiment suggests group decision-making itself can tilt behavior toward spite, a pattern worth remembering the next time a vote involves splitting up something scarce.

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Disclaimer: This article summarizes findings from a peer-reviewed study and is intended for general informational purposes. It is not a statement on the merits of voting or any political system, and readers should consult the original research for full methodological detail.

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