IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/amlawe/v9y2007i1p135-159.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Is There An Expressive Function of Law? An Empirical Analysis of Voting Laws with Symbolic Fines

Author

Listed:
  • Patricia Funk

Abstract

This article empirically investigates whether law affects behavior beyond deterrence ("expressive function of law"). With Swiss panel data, I find that the legal abolition of the voting duty significantly decreased average turnout, even though the fines for not voting have only been symbolic. As for the size of Cantonal turnout reduction, it widely differs between the Cantons and is highly correlated with voter participation before the removal of the voting duty. In contrast to the voting duty, the introduction of postal voting did not affect voter turnout in spite of the substantial decrease in transaction costs. Therefore, in public good areas such as voting, even a sanctionless law targeting at the civic duty might have a bigger impact on behavior than actions which affect the costs of provision for the public good. Copyright 2007, Oxford University Press.

Suggested Citation

  • Patricia Funk, 2007. "Is There An Expressive Function of Law? An Empirical Analysis of Voting Laws with Symbolic Fines," American Law and Economics Review, American Law and Economics Association, vol. 9(1), pages 135-159.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:amlawe:v:9:y:2007:i:1:p:135-159
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1093/aler/ahm002
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:amlawe:v:9:y:2007:i:1:p:135-159. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/aler .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.