Religion, Socio-Economic Status and Voter Behavior: Evidence from a Survey Experiment in Jakarta

Understanding voting behavior and how people make decisions is key to studying any democratic election. In-group and cognitive biases are frequently reported to influence our decision-making and judgment, including voting decisions, which may lead to illogical decisions and counter self-interest in the longer term. This paper investigates such decision biases in the case of the gubernatorial election in Jakarta. The electoral process in this case was widely seen to be marked by intolerance and discrimination against minorities rather than more substantive policy issues. I explore two plausible drivers of voting behavior and related biases, religion and socio-economic status, to analyze the paradox of high satisfaction of the candidate’s work performance and the actual election result. To this end, I use survey experiments with priming treatments in an original dataset of 228 respondents in Jakarta. The priming with religious cues substantially provoked emotions, in-line with previous studies. The evidence suggests that religiously motivated voting behavior is salient, and stronger than economicstatus anxiety. The evidence points to strong in-group bias. This present study argues that ‘ethno-religious economic’ motivations may explain paradoxical election results. Overall, the results complement previous studies in the area of social identity, priming and behavioral economics, in elections, most of which have been confined to Western countries.