Expressiveness and voting

It has been suggested that voting may be an "expressive'' action taken with out regard to any hope of actually influencing election outcomes on the mar gin. However, there has been no real-world evidence brought to bear on the question of whether the propensity of an individual to vote and the propens ity of that same individual to engage in other forms of "expressive'' behav ior are correlated in any statistically meaningful sense. Drawing from long itudinal data found in the National Election Surveys we report compelling e vidence of a strong, positive relationship between what we term "political expressiveness'' and the act of voting.