The Role of Political Ideology as a Non-Institutional Device to Enforce Contributions in a Threshold Public Goods Game

In this study, we experimentally analyze public goods games with an interior provision point. The role of ideology is tested in two different environments in which the political affiliation of group members is manipulated. While in the first experiment, participants’ ideology was no salient, in the second experiment the ideology of participants was salient among the group members. We ex ante manipulated the composition of the groups attending to their reported ideology to check the different behavior between groups. Liberal and conservative subjects follow different behavioral patterns and liberal groups reach the threshold more frequently. When information about the ideology of the other group members is public, the effect is significantly stronger. We analyze different behavioral patterns and find different conditional cooperation behavior across ideological positions. The results from the two experiments show how ideology works as a coordination device for liberal participants, improving contributions to the public goods provision, and rising efficiency