{"id":158,"date":"2008-11-02T12:08:26","date_gmt":"2008-11-02T12:08:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=158"},"modified":"2008-11-02T12:08:26","modified_gmt":"2008-11-02T12:08:26","slug":"why-vote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/why-vote\/","title":{"rendered":"Why vote?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Someone once joked that economists are people who see something working in practice, and then wonder if it will also work in theory.\u00a0\u00a0 One practice that mainstream economists have long failed to explain theoretically is voting.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Following the (so-called) rational choice models of Arrow and Downs, they calculate the likely net monetary benefit of voting to an individual voter, and compare that to the likely net costs to the voter.\u00a0 With long queues due to inadequately-resourced or incompetently-managed voting administrations (such as those in many US states), these costs can be considerable.\u00a0 Since one vote is very unlikely to have any marginal consequences, economists are stumped as to why any person votes.
\nOne explanation for voting, of course, is that voters are indeed feeble-minded or irrational, unable to calculate the costs and benefits themselves, or,\u00a0if they can, unable to act in their own self-interest.\u00a0\u00a0 This is the standard explanation, and it strikes me as morally reprehensible:\u00a0 a failure to explain or model some phenomenon theoretically is justified on the grounds that the phenomenon should not exist.
\nAnother explanation for voting may be that the rational-choice models understate the benefits or overstate the costs to individuals of voting.\u00a0\u00a0 Some economists, as if in a parody of themselves, have now\u00a0 – in 2008!\u00a0 – discovered altruism<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0Factor in the\u00a0benefits to others,\u00a0\u00a0this study claims, and the balance of benefits to costs may move more in favour of benefits.
\nA third explanation for voting may be that rational-choice models are simply inappropriate to the phenomena under study.\u00a0 The rational choice model assumes that citizens in a democracy are passive consumers of political ideas and proposals, with their only action being the selection of representatives at election times.\u00a0\u00a0 Since at least the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, this quaint notion of a passive citizenry has been rebutted repeatedly by direct political action by citizens.\u00a0 The most famous example, of course, was the uprising against colonial taxation known as the American War of Independence, which, one imagines,\u00a0some economist or two may have heard speak of.\u00a0\u00a0 There’s also the various revolutions and uprisings of 1789, 1791, 1848, 1854, 1871, 1905, 1910, 1917, 1926, 1949, 1953, 1956, 1968\u00a0and 1989, just to list the most important since\u00a0economics began to be studied systematically.
\nAn historically-informed observer would surely conclude that a model of voting in which citizens produce as well as consume political ideas is likely to have more calibrative traction than one in which citizens do nothing except (if they so choose) vote.\u00a0\u00a0 Such a theory already exists in political science, where it goes under the name of deliberative democracy.\u00a0\u00a0 One wonders what terrors would strike the earth were an economist to read the relevant literature before modeling some domain.
\nPeople vote not only out of their own self-interest (if they ever do that), but also to influence the direction of their country, to act in solidarity with others, to elect to join a group, to demonstrate membership of a group, to respond to peer pressure, because the\u00a0law requires they do, or to exercise a hard-won civil right.\u00a0\u00a0Only a person with no sense of history – an economist, say – would fail to understand the importance – indeed, the extreme rationality – of this last factor, especially during a year when a major political party has nominated a black candidate for President of the USA, and the other party a woman for Veep.\u00a0 At the founding of the USA, neither candidate would have been allowed to vote.
\nNot for the first time, mainstream economics has ignored social structures and processes when studying social phenomena, focusing only on those factors which can be assigned to an individual (indeed, some idealized, self-interested, desiccated calculating machine) and, within these, only on factors able to be quantified.\u00a0\u00a0 The big question here is not why people vote, which is obvious, but why economists seem unable to recognize social structures and processes which can be clearly seen by most everyone else.\u00a0 What is it about\u00a0mainstream economists that makes them autistic<\/a>\u00a0in this regard?\u00a0\u00a0 Do they simply have an under-supply of inter-personal intelligence<\/a>, unable to empathize with or reason about others?
\n 
\nReferences and Acknowledgments:<\/em>
\nHat-tip to <\/em>Normblog<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em>
\nKenneth J. Arrow [1951]: Social Choice and Individual Values<\/em>. New York City, NY, USA:\u00a0Wiley.
\nJ. Bessette [1980]: “Deliberative Democracy: The majority principle in republican government”,\u00a0 pp. 102-116, in: R. A. Goldwin and W. A. Schambra (Editors): How Democratic is the Constitution?<\/em> Washington, DC, USA: American Enterprise Institute.
\nJames Bohman and William\u00a0Rehg (Editors) [1997]: Deliberative Democracy:\u00a0 Essays on Reason and Politics<\/em>.\u00a0 Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
\nAnthony Downs [1957]: An Economic Theory of Democracy<\/em>. New York City, NY, USA: Harper and Row.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Someone once joked that economists are people who see something working in practice, and then wonder if it will also work in theory.\u00a0\u00a0 One practice that mainstream economists have long failed to explain theoretically is voting.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Following the (so-called) rational choice models of Arrow and Downs, they calculate the likely net monetary benefit of voting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,21,23,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-culture","category-decision-theory","category-economics","p1","y2008","m11","d02","h12"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=158"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/158\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}