Why should people vote?
That’s a standard Introduction to Political Science question. You throw out that question and the students stare at you with their mouths open. They’ve been taught that voting is a good thing, though few have actually bothered to do it. Still, there aren’t expecting a professor to make such a heretical statement. Then you go on and give all the reasons why they haven’t bothered to show up on Election Day: it’s a pain to drive to the voting booth, everybody’s been working all day, you just want to watch TV or get a burger, you don’t know any of the names on the ballot, it doesn’t seem to make a difference who’s in office, your one vote might not make a difference.
They say, yeah, yeah. Then you reign then back in and try to give some reasons why it might be rational to vote.
The next questions are always: who should vote? Should uninformed people vote? If most people can’t identify the vice-president, should they vote?
Since the students are convinced that people are stupid (except for themselves) and should be barred from voting, I usually take the opposite approach and explain that voters, even dumb ones, make good choices. I’m going to have to think up some new arguments.
From Sunday’s Times magazine:
Now Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, has attracted notice for raising a pointed question: Do voters have any idea what they are doing? In his provocative new book, “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies,” Caplan argues that “voters are worse than ignorant; they are, in a word, irrational — and vote accordingly.” Caplan’s complaint is not that special-interest groups might subvert the will of the people, or that government might ignore the will of the people. He objects to the will of the people itself.
The hitch, as Caplan points out, is that this miracle of aggregation works only if the errors are random. When that’s the case, the thousands of ill-informed votes in favor of the bad health plan are canceled out by thousands of equally ignorant votes in favor of the good plan. But Caplan argues that in the real world, voters make systematic mistakes about economic policy — and probably other policy issues too.
Interesting article with a reference to the debate in the blogosphere and a quote from Ezra Klein.
Apt. 11d 
Those who care to vote already exercise greater influence over the government than they would in a system in which everyone votes. I can’t buy the argument that because we don’t like the outcome of an election, we should disenfranchise significant numbers of voters.
I believe that hubris is the great vice of those who consider themselves well-educated. It is a huge assumption to maintain that better informed voters will uniformly choose the more desireable candidate. People can, and do, differ on almost any proposed solution to any problem.
Is the definition of an “uninformed voter” someone who doesn’t vote like an economist? If so, that’s rather the point of democracy. The elite does not have a monopoly on truth or insight, although they love to think they do. On many issues, my plumber is more practical than my doctor, and both citizens have the right to vote.
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As far as I’m concerned, I vote so that I have the right to complain when I don’t like how it’s going (or to rightfully express outrage when the person I voted for does something stupid).
I recently blogged about going to vote with my friend in Spain. Having lived under a dictatorship for 40+ years, they don’t take the right to vote for granted.
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JuliaK: “I believe that hubris is the great vice of those who consider themselves well-educated.
Amen.
I get annoyed at a certain sort of economist (cough-cough, GMU libertarians, cough) who seem honestly to believe that there is one obvious, incontrovertable ‘right answer’ to any and all questions of economic and political life, and anyone who doesn’t reach their conclusions is dumb, irrational, etc — as if thoughtful people cannot reasonably disagree about such complex and inevitably moral matters.
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I dunno … I remember two elections ago in Chicago I stood next to a woman who proudly proclaimed that, when picking judges, she votes for any women or anyone with an Irish-sounding name. This did not exactly thrill me. And it’s not exactly unusual here.
I worry these days about the death of leisure time, and the resulting impact on people’s ability to take part in the democratic process. If you’re working 70 hours a week you simply don’t have time to stay informed about political matters. Next thing you know you’re picking a president based on a couple of sound bites. It makes the country vulnerable to demagogues.
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Jen has an interesting point. I doubt American women today have less leisure today than in 1920 when they simultaneously got the vote and brought the country to its knees with Prohibition. (Although now that I think about it, poor women now probably have more leisure, and rich women probably have less.)
Apologies to US history experts!
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That needs another sentence.
I doubt American women of today have less leisure than their counterparts in 1920, but I bet we do have less leisure than our counterparts of the 1950s. Oh for long leisurely days at home with the kids in school, an immaculate home, and lots of time to split between the Garden Club and the John Birch Society! (Real example, by the way.)
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I also found that article annoying in that Caplan doesn’t seem to understand that on many issues, there might be complicated ethical, moral, philosophical, historical, etc. dimensions interwoven with what he takes to be obvious, transparent “right” and “wrong” choices.
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Umm, the woman voting for the woman or the Irish is using a form of shorthand- probabilistically she can assume that a woman will have a level of humanity and understanding, and that the Irishman will have a Catholic perspective on values like mercy. My father, with multiple advanced degrees, politically connected, – as in a career in politics, takes these same shortcuts when he is confronted with an unknown on the ballot.
This is, btw, the reason that the extreme far right wing puts women on the ballot. Their ideology is that women should completely stay home, yet they want thes women to act as stealth candidates,so they choose power over principle. Some of the more spectacularly stupid Republican quotes come from these women.
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ariU,
Huh? Which female Republican candidates/politicians are we talking about here? Christine Todd Whitman? Who else? I’m drawing a blank here.
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Olympia Snowe?
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Elizabeth Dole?
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Many years ago (18?) the Larouchies won a big Illinois Democratic primary by the tactic of putting up a slate of candidates with anglo/irish names, and relying (successfully) on a combination of ignorance and anti-slavic sentiment. The Dems had to disown them.
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I’m sorry, but if you don’t know who you’re voting for, you shouldn’t be voting. Which is difficult in Illinois, given that every election we are faced with page after page of ballots for judges, etc. Too many races; you can’t keep track. I have to call numerous friends and print out long lists of judges endorsed by various legal organizations, and bring it all into the voting booth with me. Unless everyone around me has it all memorized, it seems others are unwilling to go to these lengths.
It may actually be on purpose in Chicago. The allure of that “vote straight democratic” lever can be overwhelming at 7am, when you don’t know most of the candidates anyway.
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“Umm, the woman voting for the woman or the Irish is using a form of shorthand- probabilistically she can assume …”
Whatever one thinks about such assumptions, the way to pass when infiltrating a herd of polisci junkies is to refer to these as heuristics (and have handy the famous parable of Gerald Ford chowing down on an unshucked tamale!)
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“Umm, the woman voting for the woman or the Irish is using a form of shorthand- probabilistically she can assume …”
Whatever one thinks about such assumptions, the way to pass when infiltrating a herd of polisci junkies is to refer to these as heuristics (and have handy the famous parable of Gerald Ford chowing down on an unshucked tamale!)
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Jen – I have voted in Chicago elections and remember the long ballots. I remember casting a vote for one guy because he had a cool nickname on the ballot. It was “the guitar” or “bluesman” or something like that. Let those who have only cast knowledgable votes cast the first stone.
loren – I’m laughing at us. Between Sam Crane’s Robert Putnam reference in the last post and your reference to Ford and the tamale, it’s polsci geek week at 11D. Hey, I saw you thanked in the recent issue of APSR. I liked the article and forwarded it to Harry B at CT.
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Sorry to say. Caplan’s book is full of illogical and contradictory arguments, mangled terms, cultural prejudice, and a whole lot of other weaknesses. It’s also pretty scary when you really think about what he is arguing for. Like a lot of cloistered academics, he’s hermetically sealed inside his own thinking and theories, and totally unhinged from the real world… past and present. I won’t recap the whole list of objections here… but it’s on my site. (literalmayhem.com)
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