Sociotropic voting

Sociotropic voting describes political judgment made with reference to the country’s collective economic condition, rather than only to a voter’s personal financial situation. The book invokes it as evidence that people may respond politically to how the wider society is doing, challenging a strictly self-interested model of human choice and connecting electoral judgment to its wider argument about collective intelligence.

Political judgment beyond personal interest

The concept appears in a discussion of self-interest and political behavior. Donald R. Kinder and D. Roderick Kiewiet argued that voters were “sociotropic” rather than “egotropic”: their judgments reflected collective economic conditions, not merely personal grievances. In this account, a voter can care about the direction of the national economy even when that judgment does not describe the voter’s own immediate material circumstances.

That distinction matters because a narrow economic model treats each person’s choices as guided by personal benefit and independent of what happens to others. Sociotropic voting complicates that picture. Political judgment may take the common condition as its object, showing that individual decisions can incorporate an assessment of shared circumstances rather than reduce to private gain.

Relation to collective judgment

The book’s broader account of crowds rests on the possibility that people bring different information and judgments to a common decision. When opinion is diverse and independent, and a mechanism aggregates individual views, errors can cancel while information remains. Sociotropic voting fits this larger argument as a form of public judgment directed toward a collective outcome: voters assess more than their individual situation when considering the economy’s condition.

The concept should not be mistaken for proof that every voter is well informed or that collective judgment is invariably correct. The book’s account of crowd wisdom depends on conditions such as diversity, independence, decentralization, and aggregation; a shared concern by itself does not guarantee an accurate result. Sociotropic voting identifies the orientation of judgment, while the broader framework asks when individual judgments can combine into a reliable collective verdict.

Scope and significance

The cited research gives the term a specific political meaning: voters’ economic assessments can be social in their object, not simply egotropic calculations of personal welfare. The book uses that finding to question a universal account of self-interest and to make room for judgments about the common condition within its discussion of collective intelligence. It therefore links electoral behavior to a broader possibility: people may contribute information to public decisions not only by pursuing their own immediate interests, but also by evaluating outcomes that concern society as a whole.