I keep blathering on about pluralist ideals of market democracy, and yet I live in a country where far less than 50% of people vote. Gordon Mohr argues that one shouldn’t vote unless you’re familiar with the issues.
First, rather than saying that you shouldn’t vote unless you’ve studied the issues, I would just say that you should study the issues. Voting or not is certainly a matter of personal preference, and I’m comfortable with people making the choice not to vote. Of course, I’m also comfortable with people who decide to vote even though they’re not familiar with the issues, as I believe the right to vote (even to vote poorly) is a fundamental human one.
My only concern is that voting does require a certain naive belief in democracy and even an irrational belief that one person can have an impact. That is, voting is almost impossible to justify as a matter of simple economics.
To see why, assume that your city of 100,000 is voting to raise the minimum wage from $6 to $10 an hour, which will directly mean your salary goes from $12 K to $20 K a year. What could be more obvious than that you should take the hour to go vote, right? Well, no. Technically, with majority-take-all voting (like we use in the States), your vote only matters if it’s the tie-breaking one. If about half the folks are going to vote, that’s a 1 in 50,000 chance that your vote will matter. Multiply that by the $8,000 you’ll get if the vote passes, and the expected value of you voting is 16 cents. Since you already make $6 an hour, your time is definitely worth more than 16 cents.
Now, there’s still a whole raft of reasons to vote, such as civic responsibility, the warm feeling it gives you compared to the billion or so people who don’t have the right, the huge regret you’d feel if the measure really did lose by 1 vote, etc. However, it’s just not worth doing solely for the economic basis. (And, of course, most votes have far less clear economic benefits, and your impact is diluted across more voters.)
On the other hand, all sorts of areas of modern life (from co-worker interaction, to friendships, to dating, to most areas of morality) would be quite unpleasant if they were decided solely on a rational economic basis. For instance, I don’t think we should dump our toxic waste to Africa (as former Treasury secretary and now Harvard president Larry Summers once facetiously suggested), even though resulting deaths in Africa would have far less economic impact than ones here (due to their lower incomes).
Eiji Hirai | 05-Jan-03 at 10:49 pm | Permalink
You hit upon one of several aspects of most US elections that strikes me
as bizarre, which is the Winner Take All system. A more sensible alternative
would be a Proportional Representation. For example, if 51% of the voters in
a state vote Democratic and 47% vote Republican, then the Democratic party
should send close to 51% of the representatives as Democrats, and not 100%.
The other bizarre aspect is the “spoiler” problem, and whose sensible
alternative is Instant Runoff Voting. In the 2002 US Presidential Election,
if you want to vote for Ralph Nader and your second choice is Al Gore and not
George W. Bush, who do you vote for? Or in the 1992 US Presidential Election,
if you want to vote for Ross Perot and your second choice is George Bush and
not Bill Clinton, who should you vote for? In the current broken system, a
vote for Nader or Perot is effectively a vote for Gore and Clinton, your worst
choice. Instant Runoff Voting will fix this where your 2nd and 3rd choice
votes do matter.
These aren’t hard to implement and they’re not that controversial, but it does
fly in the face of entrenched hide-bound tradition, which is always stronger
than common sense.
I found some web sites that go into more details about this:
Californians for Electoral Reform
http://www.fairvoteca.org/
California IRV Coalition
http://www.calirv.org/
Gordon Mohr | 05-Jan-03 at 11:31 pm | Permalink
Agree 100% with Eiji on instant-runoff voting (IRV). It’ll remedy some of the distortions and gaming in winner-take-all single-round plurality (or even followup 2-candidate-runoff) elections. IRV is coming in the next round of San Francisco elections… I hope it’ll spread from there.
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A digression on Dan’s “for instance” about how “unpleasant” economic rationality might be: what if the toxic wastes cause 10,000 premature deaths, but the cash payment received for taking the waste saves 20,000 lives?
You might still find the idea abhorrent, but if that’s the actual tradeoff, we wouldn’t be doing a poorer nation any favors by denying them the option of taking the wastes.
And lest you think this example is hopelessly contrived… it seems largely equivalent to the deal we offer, and developing nations accept, when we buy our electronics (and other high-toxic-byproduct goods) from jurisdictions with weaker worker and environmental protections. They’re taking a health hit, but also receiving an income (and indirect health) benefit, but only hard-headed economic rationality can tell us (or them) if the trade is worth it.
–
(I’ll eventually have more on the benefits of rational voter disengagement at my blog…)
Dan Kohn | 06-Jan-03 at 12:20 am | Permalink
Thanks, Eiji, for pointing out how excellent IRV is. It’s both expensive and unrepresentative to have a runoff election a month later, when a tiny bit of voter education can accomplish the same thing in one fell swoop.
Eiji Hirai | 06-Jan-03 at 5:49 pm | Permalink
Does voting fit into the general behavior where people will perform an action that is for the public good even when the action will not necessarily get back an economic benefit that’s commensurate with the cost? [ You can tell that I haven't taken an econ course. ]
The behavior that I’m talking about is where Bill Gates gives $100 million for AIDS prevention in India. Or where most customers in the US tip 15% for normal service, even if they never expect to be served by the same waiter/waitress again. Or where consumers buy a hybrid engine car which costs $3000 more than a similar car without the hybrid engine, and the gas savings will never reach $3000 over the lifetime of the car.
All of these things are things that I would do (I’m not Bill Gates, but I do give to charity, I tip 15% and I am seriously thinking of buying a hybrid). None of them make any economic sense.
Is voting the same, or is it slightly different?
What would society look like if everyone behaved rationally?
Anonymous | 22-Feb-03 at 3:14 pm | Permalink
http://www.plastic.com/article.html?sid=02/08/28/00244459#6
http://www.aip.org/physnews/graphics/html/voting.htm