Voting, is it pointless, altrusitic, or something else?

Here is a great video from PBS that describes the economics of voting in laymen terms. It features one of the worlds most respected economists, Gordon Tullock.

Here is one of my favorite economists, Tyler Cowen, on voting:

Most of what you do is for expressive value anyway, so you shouldn't feel guilty about voting, if indeed you vote. The people who think they are being instrumentally rational by not voting are probably deceiving themselves more. They are actually engaged in an even less transparent form of expressive behavior (protest against the voting system) and yet cloaking that behavior under the guise of instrumental rationality. The best arguments against voting are simply if you either don't like voting or if you don't know which candidate is better. High-status people hardly ever offer the latter justification, even though the split of opinions among high-status people suggests that not all high-status people can in fact know which candidate is better.

In other words, both voting and not voting are motivated by the thought that you are better than other people. I am glad that we have an entire day devoted to this very important concept.

And here is an abstract of a paper by Julio Rotemberg on voting altruism:

This paper presents a goal-oriented model of political participation based on two psychological assumptions. The first is that people are more altruistic towards individuals that agree with them and the second is that people's well-being rises when other people share their personal opinions. The act of voting is then a source of vicarious utility because it raises the well-being of individuals that agree with the voter. Substantial equilibrium turnout emerges with nontrivial voting costs and modest altruism. The model can explain higher turnout in close elections as well as votes for third-party candidates with no prospect of victory. For certain parameters, these third party candidates lose votes to more popular candidates, a phenomenon often called strategic voting. For other parameters, the model predicts "vote-stealing" where the addition of a third candidate robs a viable major candidate of electoral support.

Here is the paper.

Here is another article on the altruistic nature of voting.

Are people really this altruistic? And if so what is their behavior like the other 364 days of the year? When going to the polls think about this and if you are that altruistic maybe it is time you act like it in other ways as well.