March 29, 2006
From the desk of Jane Galt:When ignorance is rational
Economists are fond of pointing out that voting is an irrational act; since the odds of your vote actually affecting the outcome are practically nonexistant, you'd be better off staying home and watching a good movie. In fact, the expected utility of voting is so low, you'd be better off staying home and really cleaning the grout in the bathtub joints.
This is somewhat reminiscent of the famous joke about University of Chicago economists:
Two economists are walking along the street. One of them spies a $100 bill lying on the pavement, and leans down to retrieve it. The second one restrains him. "Don't be ridiculous, John! If that were really a $100 bill, someone would already have picked it up."
Obviously, people are getting some sort of utility out of voting that has nothing to do with casting the deciding vote. There are lots of theories about what this utility might be, but like theories about what makes men so defensively territorial about remote control devices, they tend to be speculative and heavily biased towards the theoreticians personal experiences.
What people do engage in is rational ignorance of politics: put simply, because they are so unlikely to affect the outcome, they mostly don't put much effort into deciding who to vote for. Guest-blogging over on the Volokh Conspiracy, Ilya Somin has an interesting post on how that played out in the Israeli elections:
In a proportional representation (PR) system such as that in Israel, the problem may be even worse than in the US. Voters in a PR system need to know not only what the policy differences between the parties are, but also what effect voting for a particular party will have on the resulting coalition government that emerges from an election. In some cases, increasing the vote total of a right-wing party might actually increase the chance of creating a more left-wing coalition government or vice versa.Posted by Jane Galt at March 29, 2006 3:49 PM | TrackBack | Technorati inbound linksYesterday's Israeli election is a good example of this. In order to form a government, Israeli politicians must put together a coalition with at least 61 seats in the 120 seat parliament. Yesterday, the centrist Kadima Party got 28 seats, while right-wing parties (Likud, NU-NPR, Yisrael Beteinu) got 32, and parties to the left of Kadima got 31 (Labor 20, Meretz 4, Pensioner's Party 7). Various special interest parties, got most of the remaining seats. Kadima is unlikely to form a coalition with the right-wing parties because these parties oppose Kadima's central policy agenda: unilateral withdrawal from large parts of the West Bank. But because Kadima got only 28 seats, they will almost certainly have to form a coalition with the Labor Party (20) and perhaps other leftist parties as well. Had more right-wing voters picked Kadima rather than the parties closer to their views, Kadima might have won enough seats (say 40) to be able to form a government without Labor (which many Kadima leaders would have preferred to do), and therefore a government that would be less leftist.
Ironically, by voting for right-wing parties instead of Kadima, Israeli rightists may well have ensured a more left-wing government than would have resulted from their voting for Kadima instead! They "achieved" the opposite result from the one they probably intended. I suspect that this occurred at least in part because Israeli right-wing voters (like most other voters in PR systems) simply had insufficient incentive to put in the time necessary to think systematically about the impact of picking a particular party on the resulting coalition.
The extra knowledge burden imposed by the need to calculate coalition possibilities is an important (and generally ignored) weakness of PR electoral systems.
And the result of our winner take all policies is that whoever I vote for differs with me on more issues than I agree on - and also, that no matter how many times voters pick the alleged smaller government candidate, all levels of government keep growing...
I've never understood that line of thinking. Voting doesn't affect outcomes? Voting is the ONLY thing that affects outcomes. It's not as if some fat-cat has 1000 votes and you have one -- everyone's is counted equally. (Shut up, Jesse Jackson.)
That's way too complicated line of argumentation for normal people. You vote for the party that best represents your beliefs, or the party that got your uncle a fat job.
Leave sophisticated speculations to economy professors. They love them, despite their uselesness.
Of course voting affects outcomes. But *your* vote doesn't affect the outcome enough to warrant the time and money you spend on voting. That is the essence of the rational choice controversy.
And you are sadly mistaken if you think economy professors are the ones who care most about this. Green and Shapiro have long (I read one of their books a over decade ago when it first came out) campaigned against the Rational Choice School among political scientists. The RC school is strong among poli sci/international relations. Which means the staffer who actually writes bills for Congress is an adherent, as is the advisor who has the President's ear.
It's always seemed to me that the same logic would result in politicians neglecting constituent services. Doesn't happen. One vote is actually worth quite a bit, if you measure the things the recipient is willing to do to get it and keep it.
Proportional voting has always seemed rife with landmines to me. I'm not sure I like the principle of voting for a party, then letting the party decide who my vote actually goes to elect. It seems like that lets the party schlep in on the value of my vote, since the candidate now owes the party apparatus for letting him have the benefit of my vote, as well as myself for actually voting that way. I prefer the US system, where every vote is for an identifiable human being.
"Economists are fond of pointing out that voting is an irrational act"
So is being ethical. The reason for ethics is, "what if everyone did it?" The reason for voting is, "what if no one did it?"
Just as one vote will not change an election, one person voting or not voting will not have any appreciable effect on whether "no one does it" or not. The individual's interest cannot be perfectly, or even approximately served, by a faction of millions. Some people influence others' votes more, so they have a greater obligation to vote. The reason for ethics is to be able to sleep at night, not to influence "everyone's" actions. The major effect that voting a particular way, or voting at all, can have on an individual is acceptance or rejection by his immediate peer group. That's reason enough for most people to vote, but it doesn't change the infinitesimal effect of the individual's vote by enough to matter.
Being ethical isn't usually irrational. The people around you generally are aware of your unethical acts and their future behaviour towards you will reflect that knowledge. It is in your own self interest to act "ethical". Traditionally humans lived in small, fixed social groups. "Ethical" behaviour makes perfect, rational sense in that environment.
In a world of secret ballot voting, polisci types have been having a hard explaining the rational choice for voting.
I vote just so I can truthfully tell an incumbent that "I didn't vote for your (major party opponent) last time, but your latest postion on so and so makes it unlikely I'll vote for you this time." Or, "I voted for you, but...."
Probably works just as well if you didn't actually vote, but one hasn't lied which is important when one is questioning the integrity of the incumbent in question.
Actually, it can be mathematically demonstrated that any voting system, forced to pick one of at least three choices, will produce perverse results in certain circumstances: Arrow's impossibility theorem.
"It's always seemed to me that the same logic would result in politicians neglecting constituent services. Doesn't happen. One vote is actually worth quite a bit, if you measure the things the recipient is willing to do to get it and keep it."
That assumes that one vote is in play from an angry constituent, which is probably not true. One person who feels personally slighted is possibly a walking "I hate candidate x" billboard. Also, if voting is primarily done for social reasons, as has been suggested above, we often see social groups moved by their most vocal members. Angry people complain more than happy people praise.
It works to a lesser degree in the opposite direction. "Oh, he's that nice man who helped my granddaughter that one time. I'll vote for him." You will occasionally hit gold doing one nice thing for someone who will love you forever (and tell his/her friends), which is a nice bonus for avoiding the person who will hate you forever (and tell his/her friends).
The difference between Israel and the USA is that there are discernible, substantive differences among the many Israeli parties, while the differences between the Republicrats and the Demoblicans (if any there be -- the jury has been out on that for about 15 years) are solely at the margins.
It looks to me like the Israelis are going to get what they want, a hudna, a truce, among the Jews. The 'pensioner's party' and similar in the spectrum are concerned with the 'little people' who have been 'ignored' in the left wing opera of peace through finding the Palestinian who would split a difference. But then that isn't where this 'left wing' is going to go; so the 'right' doesn't lose. RE: this and hudna,
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=700207&contrassID=2&postID=114371465374644881
Wow. Fascinating. It may seem counterintuitive, but in a sense it sounds like a PR system self-balances by letting extremist views on either side create an opposing force that effectively keeps them in check. Considering human nature, I wonder if that's all bad.
Wow. Fascinating. It may seem counterintuitive, but in a sense it sounds like a PR system self-balances by letting extremist views on either side create an opposing force that effectively keeps them in check.
Whereas ours keeps them in check by letting them lose elections.
Add "proportional representation" to the long list of foolish ideas from other countries that the United States has wisely avoided.
This is a side-note, but inflation must be greater than I'd realized. Every time I heard variations on that famous joke, there was only a $20 bill on the sidewalk. Are we so rich now that a $20 bill wouldn't catch anyone's attention, so it had to be changed to a $100 bill?
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