On a wintry night a few weeks ago, I was walking with Aaron Edlin across the Harvard campus when he casually claimed that the “voter’s paradox” wasn’t generally true — that it could be rational for people to vote for purely instrumental reasons.
I did a double take, because the chance that my vote will change the result of any election in my lifetime is vanishingly small. People might vote because it gives them pleasure, or because of its expressive value, but most economists think that it would never be worth your while to vote in order to impact an election, because of the small probability that any one vote is “pivotal.” But Aaron, together with co-authors Andrew Gelman and Noah Kaplan, has written a very important article showing that it can be rational to vote if you care about other people. If you care even a little bit about the welfare of your fellow citizens, then as the electorate increases, even though the probability of being pivotal becomes small, the impact of being pivotal becomes large. Thus, it can be instrumentally rational to vote even in winner-take-all elections with very large number of voters.
This claim, at first, struck me as being true, but too cute. However, the article does have the following interesting implications:
1. As voter turnout drops, the probability of being a pivotal voter increases, while the benefits of being a pivotal voter remain constant (being a function of the number of people in society, and not the number of voters). This means that there will be a smaller turnout in regions in which socially minded voters find it worthwhile to vote.
2. The model also explains, from an instrumental perspective, a new reason why voters may care about electability. In the voter’s paradox world, it is hard to figure out not only why people vote, but why they vote for candidates who are not their first choice. Under the old view, since there was (almost) no chance that your vote would matter, if you voted, you might as well have expressed support for the candidate you liked best. But Edlin’s model suggests that the probability of being pivotal will be higher for one of the dominant two candidates than it will be for a third-party candidate. So Edlin voters might find it rational to vote for second-best candidates who have a higher chance of winning.
Still, to my mind, the neatest implication of the model is that it suggests that publicly minded citizens will have a much larger say in our polity. In Edlin’s model, selfish citizens will not vote, and publicly minded citizens will. Indeed, the more you care about your fellow citizens, the more likely you are to vote.
The unwillingness of the U.S. system to bribe people to vote, or (as Australia does) punish people who don’t vote, operates as a kind of a poll tax on the selfish citizens who care only about themselves. Is it a good idea to promote this kind of selfishness selection, or should we mandate (or affirmatively incentivize) voting? I’m not sure. But whether it is good or bad, the systematic censoring of selfish voters is something that has big implications for the kinds of policies we would expect government to adopt.
So if you live in Ohio or Texas (or Vermont or Rhode Island), and if you care about the welfare of your fellow Americans, make sure to vote.
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My reading of the paper is that the results and findings are driven by inter-election variation. That means, everyone still has identical preferences altruistic preferences within an election.
I think that means to explain variation in turnout within countries, we have to assume that how much you care about people changes over time, unless all of th action is in changes on the payoffs. To explain turnout across countries you have to assume people in different countries have different altruistic preferences.
This raises the question: why might altruism change across time and place? Do we really think that the fluctuations in US turnout are driven by differences in just payoffs and altruistic preferences over time?
The trouble with the predictions of the model is that the authors don’t state what the predictions of an alternative model would be. The leading contender, in my mind, is that people gain some utility from the act of voting itself. The theory and evidence around this are only weakly developed. testing between competing hypotheses seems to me to be the only way ahead here.
What about the Thai system. There everyone is forced to vote, but you can cast a null vote and if the null votes win the government is dissolved. I’d bet that if this were the system in the US there would have been a few times this happened in the last 30 years.
I for one support the economist’s view of voting. It makes no sense for the large mass of people to vote, since their votes will not count. I especially support this view for republican voters, but that’s a side story.
Please, all of you in red states, be rational, don’t vote, as your vote won’t matter. And let all of us public minded people have a greater effect on the election. It might be a road to better policy. Probably not.
Republicans don’t need to vote because the affect gov policy all thru the 4 year term, with lobbying, graft and bribery.
Democrats need to vote.
Yes, it is quite true that the chances are infinitesimal that any one vote will turn out to be pivotal. But the natural extension of this notion, derails it completely. If enough people decide, because of this, not to vote, then of the smaller number who do vote, the chance of pivotality grows. And taken to its extreme conclusion … i.e. if EVERY voter decides not to vote because their individual vote won’t matter … then there will be NO election at all.
I’ve followed the economics of voting for a while now, and this issue (i.e. the ultimate conclusion of the “voting doesn’t count” thinking that economics has arrived at) flies in the face of the obvious fact that we DO have elections and will continue to have elections even if economists decide we may as well not bother voting.
The cold hard fact is that each vote has a value. A small value to be sure, which is inversely proportional to the number of voters; but so long as an election is held at all, each vote has value nonetheless. Deciding that a vote has value ONLY if it defies the odds sufficiently to be the ONE vote that changes a result, is merely a subjective value judgement on the part of economists.
Thus, once again academia maneuvers itself into a realm of fuzzy logic and paradox which does not take reality into account. I think it may well be time for economists to move onto some other issue where they might actually have something useful to say that doesn’t contradict reality or quibble it to death. And one which isn’t based upon their own subjective value judgements.
Newt, why did you divorce your cancer-ridden wife after cheating on her? For someone who preaches the importance of family values, you sure seem to have your share of moral lapses!
I think you linked to the wrong paradox – your initial link send a reader to a page describing Arrow’s impossibility theorem, which is quite distinct from the problem of the rational voter (and why said voter would ever vote). Did I miss something?
An analogy: Imagine a famous author writes a book that you really want to read. The author has said that he will post the book on the Internet if he gets 100,000 donations of $1 each. If he doesn’t get 100,000 donates, he will destroy the book.
Is it rational to contribute a dollar even though, most likely, that dollar won’t be the deciding dollar that puts it over the top?