The (Ir)Rational Economics of Voting

I’m not sure what to make of the (often smug, not always) assurances from many “educated” commentators that it’s not only OK to not vote, but rational and intelligent. If you read political commentary, you’ve certainly ran into this many times, especially in the last few years (or so is my subjective impression). But in quick summary: your single vote among thousands, to hundred-thousands, to millions, will not matter, as a near mathematical certainty. Factor in the costs, defined broadly in the economists’ sense to include other uses of your time, etc., and you are probably losing by voting. It’s like buying a lottery ticket, only the odds are even worse and the costs are even higher. You loser!

I know better than to argue against mathematics, but I believe this is another one of those areas where human behavior, social interaction, and general cultural fuzziness blur the picture of the supposedly “cold, hard facts.” Simply put, people’s beliefs and their sense of community and duty motivate them to engage in said “irrational” act and, collectively, their votes DO matter. How exactly does the individual translate into the collective? When does subtracting grains of sand from a heap turn it into a non-heap? There is no answer. If a church, especially one of the modern suburban “mega churches”, aggressively encourages its members to vote, and most of them vote the same way, you may be talking about several hundred or a thousand or more votes in the same direction. More than enough to swing everybody’s favorite sunshine state in November 2000.

More people actually self-identify as Democrats, but the GOP keeps winning elections (hopefully a trend that is about to come to a close). This is because it is, in fact, the supposedly hard-headed, rational, economic-minded Republicans who turn out to vote in larger numbers. Surely it is their belief in the aggregate significance of their votes that motivates them as a class of voters. So the partisans of “selfishness and greed” turns out to be more community minded than the “socialists” on the other side? ;-) Yes, there is still the inescapable fact that a single vote is enormously unlikely to make a difference, but then it is also true that if many people are convinced by this logic, then their aggregate non-votes really do add up—and therefore make a difference!

Then there is the whole issue of political participation in the larger sense. That is, not just the act of voting, but the act of talking politics, of trying to sway others’ votes—or to vote at all. If self-identified Democrats are less likely to vote than self-identified Republicans, then imagine the effect of a widely heard argument to “get to the polls because it really does matter.” Let’s say few thousand more people showed up to vote in Florida in 2000. Some would have voted Republican, some Democratic, but plausibly more Democrats, because there were more Democrats who didn’t vote! So if the net result was 500-something more votes for Gore, then… In reality, perhaps the true answer is this: speak your mind, support your candidates or parties as you see fit. Encourage people to vote for your chosen people or causes. But in the end, if you don’t actually vote yourself, it won’t matter so much. Strangely paradoxical perhaps: as long as you are active, you can potentially make a difference, but your actual vote probably doesn’t count. So get out there and vote! I did. (Or am I just trying to bluff you?!)