Why Voting Matters

As promised, here is my reply to Ali's response about my post on the virtues of voting. This all started when Ali wrote:

The more I study Public Choice, the more convinced I am that voting is useless.

As one who has also studied Public Choice, I think Ali is taking the wrong conclusion from his studies. Ali is a good friend and I hope this response is not uncharitable. I mean for it to express my own views on why I disagree and to help clarify my thinking. Here goes...

Ali starts off with his economic analysis of voting:

1. Your vote doesn't matter to the outcome.

What I think Ali means to say is that your individual vote has a near-zero probability of being the deciding vote in a mass election. No argument there. I don't think anyone expects their vote to be the deciding factor in any election. (Although having voted in Florida in 2000, I came about as close as you can come for this happening in a national election.)

2. You don't have enough information about the candidates, and you will not invest enough time to find out. And if your time is incredibly cheap, and you do in fact invest that time, you're going to be roughly the only one in your area who has. All those other voters voting don't have enough information about the candidates, so the election outcome will not hinge on underlying information.

This is where I think Ali makes his first misstep in his analysis. Underlying information does matter. Just because people don't research all of it themselves doesn't mean it doesn't matter. Individuals find proxy sources such as pundits they trust, political parties to affiliate with, opinions of friends, etc. This allows them to economize on information. This is no different from how people come to make choices on a whole range of commercial goods and why branding can be so important for businesses. The credibility of these sources all hinge on underlying information which makes that information extremely relevant.

3. In a two-party system, the parties will situate themselves in the middle, to appeal to the median voter, so ultimately it won't matter if you pick the Left party or the Right party, because there aren't any Left parties or Right parties, just two parties in the Middle.

Several comments on this point and why I think who governs matters. (For reference, I believe Ali is basing this statement on the median voter theorem.)

1. The median voter theorem works only because voting does matter. Politicians know this and adjust their behavior to try to maximize the number of votes they receive.
2. Ali's statement presumes a two-party system. Good for analyzing American politics, but not for necessarily for other political systems.
3. Saying that "ultimately it won't matter if you pick the Left party or the Right party" is confusing the simplicity of the model with the complexity of reality. The model serves as a reasonably good first approximation for political behavior during elections, but has much more limited application for predicting how parties govern after elected.
4. There are two parties (in American politics) -- a Left and a Right. There is no Middle party. The Left and the Right differ a great deal in fundamental ideology. (Read Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles for an excellent treatise on this.)
5. Voters would have to be even more irrational than Bryan Caplan believes they are to invest so much energy and time into elections if parties didn't matter.
6. Leadership matters. Political leaders are often opinion leaders as well. The more charismatic they are, the more successful they will be at this. The more they sway public opinion, the more latitude they have to implement policies they believe in. I am not aware of any good economic models of leadership, but it certainly matters. (See The Leadership Challenge, Leading at the Edge)
7. Ideology matters. After getting elected, politicians will typically gravitate as far back towards their political base as they think they can without loosing popular support. If Gore had been elected President instead of Bush, the War on Terror would almost certainly have been handled differently and far more focus would have been placed on environmental policy.
8. Influence matters. Any politician who is elected brings with him or her a whole host of political relationships and networks of connection. This means they will be more easily influenced by some groups than by others. Rent-seeking by special interest groups is profoundly influenced by who gets into office, which explains why they are so willing to invest huge sums of money into political campaigns.

Ali writes:

I'm not sure I understand the positive externalities from voting in large numbers.

I have mentioned to Gordon Tullock on at least a couple of occasions that I see two key benefits to a well-functioning democracy:

1. It allows people to express disagreement without resorting to violence. By allowing people the right to try to affect political outcomes, it relieves social tension, gives an incentive for cooperation and coalition building, and helps promote peace within a society.
2. It gives accountability to political leaders by giving a periodic review of their performance. If they don't keep voters happy, they risk losing power. This tends to focus their attention on giving voters what they want. This helps to constrain the power of politicians and punish corruption when it occurs.

Tullock said he didn't disagree and then proceeded to give me one of his world-famous insults. I take that as a positive sign...

These two benefits only function if a significant portion of the population believes they have the ability to participate in political activism. As I wrote in my previous post:

Part of the reason democracy works to help maintain social order is because people believe it does. I think there is a strong tacit knowledge contained in the social stigmatization of non-voters. Don’t get so caught up in the technical analysis that you become cynical and miss out on part of the larger human dimension that is getting played out in election processes.

Ali responds to this by saying:

I'm not sure I follow. First, I'm not sure I agree that democracy "works". Second, if it works because people think it works, than surely an alternative would work if people came to believe it'd work?

When you say I shouldn't get caught up in the technical analysis, all sorts of warning bells go off. Imagine if a socialist came to you and said: "Socialism works because we're all working together. Don't get so caught up in the technical analysis that you become cynical and miss out on the element of human sacrifice and virtue that's part of the socialist process"

I'd imagine you wouldn't accept that. So why hold ourselves to lower standards with Democracy?

A few points and questions to Ali:

1. What is this "alternative" that would work if people came to believe it would work? How do you implement it and how do you get people to believe it in? What makes you think it would be better than democracy?
2. To explain what I mean by "it works", I mean it accomplishes the points I made to Gordon Tullock. It works because people believe in it in the same way that laws do. If no one believed laws would be enforced and that other people wouldn't obey them, then rule of law would ultimately break-down. That helps explain what occurs in many undeveloped countries. Expectations matter tremendously in these types of social contexts.
3. I never said to ignore the technical analysis nor did I say to lower our standards of analysis. What I did say was not to ignore that which may lie outside of it.

A few last points to make:

• When Ali says "voting is pointless", he is making a subjective, normative statement that I believe is unsupported by the positive models he is basing his conclusion on. He is a broad statement that I think over-reaches in its conclusion.
• Voting is indeed costly and individual votes have miniscule probability of affecting outcomes. As economists, rather than concluding "voting is pointless", shouldn't we instead be asking what the point of voting is?
• Economic models often ignore the influence individual actors have on one another. If everyone votes, no one vote matters, but everyone voting does. If some people don't vote, you can still get an approximation of the same outcome with a smaller number of people voting. However, if too many people become disillusioned and begin to think "voting is pointless", the positive benefits of democracy may be weakened.
• Social disapprobation of people who don't vote may be a rational cultural strategy for maintaining active participation in the democratic process, despite its costs. Most of my (non-economist) friends who don't vote in elections either try to hide the fact or feel guilt and/or shame for not voting. This cultural norm of viewing voting as a good thing may incorporate aspects of social reality that are missing in economist's models.
• Individual leaders can influence large numbers of voters. This is how mass movements start. Because each individual has one vote. the power of a large group influenced by one or several influencers can have significant impact on political outcomes.
• The notion of "one man, one vote" may help underpin the belief in the equality of all people under the law, reinforcing notions of individual rights and limited government. The act of each individual is a powerful visual reminder of this equality.

There is much more I would like to say, but will stop for now. I look forward to hearing Ali's response.