Now Who’s Rational?
I was reading through some post-mortems on the Philly elections that discussed the relatively low turnout – somewhere around 35% of registered voters showed up, and you could probably adjust those numbers to get lower figures (for all voting-age residents) or higher (just for Democrats, who were the only party with a competitive primary). The idea that many people express is that this low turnout is a bad sign – that candidates can not motivate citizens to go to the ballot box and exercise some control over their government. And there’s a part of me that agrees, that figures that voting is the minimum level of participation required in a democracy.
But then I get to thinking about the economics-driven analysis I encountered in my poli sci coursework. The framework is about figuring out what a “rational actor” would do, the assumption being that a rational actor is one who can compute costs and benefits and will not do things where the former significantly outweigh the latter. I have problems with this framework, but it does help put a question into perspective: why should anyone bother to vote? In my lifetime, I think I might have seen one story about a very local race that was decided by a single vote. And none of those were elections I voted in. So every time I have voted – and every time during my college years that I did not get an absentee ballot – my participation or lack thereof had absolutely no bearing on the outcome. If the person I voted for won, I could have stayed home and still gotten the benefit of that result. (This is the free-rider problem: if I can enjoy a public benefit without doing any of the work to procure it, why should I do the work? Especially when my contribution will make such a negligible contribution to the achievement of the benefit that it might as well be nonexistent?) If the person I voted for lost, I obviously was unable to prevent the undesirable outcome, so why not just stay home and save myself the trouble?
Thought about this way, voting is a completely irrational act, and in order to be successful political candidates have to somehow convince people to be irrational on their behalf to a greater degree than their opponent is able to do. Suddenly the nature of political campaigns makes much more sense.
Now, I’m still trying to work out in my head some way to make the act of voting a rational one, but so far the only luck I’m having is to take it out of the realm of the individual. It seems to me that if you’re going to make individual political action meaningful in any way, it has to either be a way that allows one-to-many interactions, so that what I do has a definite ripple effect, or be something that improves my own life in such a way that the social effects are incidental and not the whole point of the enterprise. That brings us back to the quest for more robust versions of democracy, but more on that another time.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.