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.