Don't vote! - the paradox of voting and the economics of not voting

Hollywood's top celebrities have been urging American citizens to get out and vote. Scroll the video forward one minute and ten seconds, and again to two minutes, to see Borat up to his usual tricks:

If the above video didn't put the fear in you, watch this:

Voting underpins the democratic system the world over but let's take some time out and ask 'how important is it, really?' It may come as a surprise, but many economists take the view that voting isn't very important at all, and that it may in fact be irrational from the perspective of the individual.

The simple premise for the argument against making your way to your local polling booth is that an individual vote carries almost no weight in the grander scheme of things, especially when weighed against the costs of voting (time, hassle, financial cost, etc). Steve Landsburg, author of the excellent 'Armchair Economist' (a book that was well ahead of the curve of popular economics books), comments that:

... my chance of casting the deciding vote in New York is about one in 10 to the 200,708th power. I have a better chance of winning the Powerball jackpot 7,400 times in a row than of affecting the election's outcome. Which makes it pretty hard to see why I should vote.

The traditional reply begins with the phrase "But if everyone thought like that ... ." To which the correct rejoinder is: So what? Everyone doesn't think like that. They continue to vote by the millions and tens of millions.

The idea of the irrelevant individual voter shocks a lot of people. Russ Roberts reports the following response when he explained this view in a seminar:

I mentioned that it's irrational to vote. Why people vote has long fascinated both economists and political scientists. The fascination is straightforward. Voting is costly, it takes time. The probability that your vote will influence the outcome of an election is basically zero or very close. So why vote?'

The journalists reacted to my claim with a mixture of outrage and laughter. They couldn't decide on whether I was a monster or simply a fool. I tried to explain the argument. No luck.

That said, Roberts does provide a counterpoint with Kant's 'categorical imperative', which basically says 'that you should act assuming that others will act the same way. And Kant is right. It's a very good moral principle that rules out all kinds of negative externalities.'

Leading public choice economist Gordon Tullock agrees with Landsberg and Roberts. The writers behind this cool interview with Tullock provide an excellent example using pizza (explanations involving pizza rarely fail). The idea is simply that when three people vote on which type of pizza to buy, it is very easy for the the third person (the marginal voter), to find themselves in a situation where they have the swinging vote. Their vote carries considerable power. However, if thousands of people are deciding on which pizza to eat then it becomes highly unlikely that any given individual's vote will affect the final outcome. It's simple: more votes = less power to each voter.

The video interview fades out with the writers presenting a kind of circular logic, commenting that if no one voted then the power of the individual voter becomes highly significant and it makes sense to vote, but then as more and more people vote, the more insignificant your vote becomes, and the less sense it makes to vote, but then ... and on and on.

The Freakonomics blog highlights the insignificance of the marginal voter with the following statistics:

For all the attention paid in the media to close elections, it turns out that they are exceedingly rare. The median margin of victory in the Congressional elections was 22 percent; in the state-legislature elections, it was 25 percent. Even in the closest elections, it is almost never the case that a single vote is pivotal. Of the more than 40,000 elections for state legislator that Mulligan and Hunter analyzed, comprising nearly 1 billion votes, only 7 elections were decided by a single vote, with 2 others tied.

So why do so many people vote?

- The Freakonomics piece suggests that social pressure plays a powerful role in getting people into the voting booths. They cite the case of Switzerland, where the introduction of a postal voting system was expected to increase voter participation but it had the opposite effect and voter turnout fell. Anonymity meant that people no longer had to turn up to vote just to save face.

- Economists Andrew Gelman and Noah Kaplan make the interesting suggestion that people may be thinking beyond themselves when they go to vote, in which case they are weighing the marginal cost of voting not against the perceived marginal benefit to themselves, but to all of society. Thinking in this way would change the size of the pay-off by no small measure:

If your vote is decisive, it will make a difference for tens of millions of people. If you think your preferred candidate could bring the equivalent of a $100 improvement in the quality of life to the average person in your country—not an implausible hope, given the size of national budgets and the impact of decisions in foreign policy, health, the environment, and other areas—you’re now buying a billion-dollar lottery ticket. With this payoff, a 1 in 10 million chance of being decisive isn't bad odds.

And many people do see it that way. Surveys show that voters choose based on who they think will do better for their country as a whole, rather than their personal betterment. Indeed, when it comes to voting, it is irrational to be selfish. The probability of your vote being decisive is roughly inversely proportional to the size of the electorate (see Gelman, King, and Boscardin, 1988, Gelman, Katz, and Bafumi, 2004, and Mulligan and Hunter, 2002, for details and empirical evidence), and your personal benefit remains flat, but the “social benefit”—the total gain for the country that you would anticipate, if your candidate wins—is proportional to the population ...

They also see through the apparent conundrum that the Tullock interview ends on, pointing to a natural equilibrium in voting turnout:

... if turnout declines, then the probability of a tied election increases, which in turn implies that, on the margin, it then becomes rational for some people to vote. The feedback with voter turnout is why voting is not a simple free-rider or prisoner’s dilemma problem: the more people who free ride (by not voting), the higher the expected benefit to you of voting, and so extremely low turnout is not an equilibrium.

Have Gelman and Noah Kaplan cracked it? The believe so:

We have rescued rational choice theory from the voter turnout paradox, but at a price, by formally decoupling rationality from self-interest (except in the uninteresting tautological sense that anything you do must be in your self-interest because otherwise you wouldn’t be doing it).

- The Stumbling and Mumbling blog also reminds us that economics tends to over simplify humans, usually only thinking in terms of 'instrumental rationality' and may be overlooking symbolic rationality:

I suspect voting is (traditionally) symbolically rational. People vote not out of cost-benefit considerations but to symbolize who they are. My grandad voted Labour all his life simply because that was what working-class people like him did. He no more thought of voting Tory than he thought of leaving the house without his hat - it was just against nature to do so.

A non-economics, pro-voting article in The American Prospect captures a few of the above points:

... it became an almost sacramental act. In today's polling places, voices are hushed and movements slow, and we move toward the altar of the booth until we are finally alone with our selections. But though our choices may be private, election day itself is one of the few occasions many of us have to gather with our community. On the others -- sporting events, concerts, watching the fireworks on the Fourth of July -- we come together as spectators, observing the action but not participating in it. And unfortunately, spectatorship characterizes much of our contemporary engagement with the world. But on election day, we gather to act. We look around at our neighbors and know that at that very instant, millions of other Americans are doing the same thing. At that moment we are something extraordinary: we are citizens.

If you have children, take them to the polls with you. Remind them that for most of human history, people had no say in who would lead them, that violence and fear determined who controlled the institutions of power. Tell them that even in our own country, founded on the most noble of democratic principles, people have had to labor and protest and fight and even die to secure this right for themselves and for others. Tell them that there are many things you can do to exercise your citizenship, but this is one thing you must do. Tell them that election day is when you act not for yourself but for your community and your country.

As someone who has never voted for a politician or political party in my life, but who would vote and perhaps even fight for 'the right to vote', I have to finish with a few more reasons for not voting:

- Don Boudreaux from Cafe Hayek does not mince his words:

I suffer from no romantic delusions about politics or about voting. So I winced when I read in the lead editorial in today's Washington Post that CBS newsman Bob Schieffer recently told his viewers "Go vote. It will make you feel big and strong."

I am perfectly capable of saving for my own retirement, of choosing whether or not to patronize a restaurant that permits smoking, of choosing which elements to ingest into my own body, of providing for the education of my son, of deciding what degree of driver and passenger safety I want in my automobile -- indeed, of doing a great number of things that government today presumes me to be too gullible or too irresponsible or too childish to do. And what is true of me, an ordinary adult, is true of nearly every other adult.

Government treats me as if I'm small and weak. This fact disgusts me.

- The president of the Mises Institute also takes up the idea of non-voting as a vote of protest against the system:

It makes them, just on the margin, a bit more fearful that they are ruling us without our consent. This is all to the good. The government should fear the people. Not voting is a good beginning toward instilling that fear.

- Comedian George Carlin comes down hard on the general public who vote in politicians only to moan and complain about them when they screw things up. By staying at home, Carlin says he has the right to complain as loud as he wants about the inevitable mess that he had no hand in creating. A word of warning: Carlin is known for being a bit of a potty-mouth. When I listen to Carlin, I am reminded of these words from the late Bernie Mac, 'It's jokes, it's fun...but it's also the truth.'