Why do individuals engage in personally costly, partisan activities that benefit others? If individuals act according to rational self-interest, then partisan activity occurs only when the benefits of that activity exceed its costs. However, laboratory experiments suggest that many people are...

Models of political participation have begun to incorporate actors who possess "social preferences". However, these models have failed to take into account the potentially incongruent political goals of different social preference types. These goals are likely to play an important role in...

Altruistic punishment is a behaviour in which individuals punish others at a cost to themselves in order to provide a public good. Fehr and Gächter1 present experimental evidence suggesting that negative emotions toward non-cooperators motivate punishment which, in turn, facilitates high levels...

We conduct experiments in which subjects participate in both a game that measures preferences for income equality and a public goods game involving costly punishment. The results indicate that individuals who care about equality are those who are most willing to punish free-riders in public...