Tim Harford's chapter eight, a contribution from Sahar Akhtar

Today's guest blogger is the very impressive Sahar Akhtar, who has a Ph.d. in both economics and philosophy; she is currently at Brown University.  As I read her post on Tim, she is saying that most people really do act -- at least in part -- as if their votes count.  I now turn "the mike" over to Sahar:

In Chapter 8, Harford illuminates a large chunk of life with a single insight. Borrowing from Schelling once more, along with a little Bates and North, he shows us that individually rational behavior doesn’t always add up to collectively rational results. But this time the domain is politics, and it might be a stretch to say people always behave rationally.

The analysis he provides on issues where there are high stakes, like revolutions and trade barriers, is pretty great. So I’m going to instead focus on the issue that’s been so hashed out that the marginal contribution of any additional discussion is almost as low as the marginal impact of my vote. But I’m not fully rational.

The rest of Sahar's contribution comes under the fold...

Harford writes that voters aren’t fooled into thinking their votes affect the outcome and that most people vote because it makes them feel good. These ‘expressive’ explanations help us preserve the idea that people are rational (a great book is by Brennan and Lomasky).  But is this an actual account of why people vote? Until we have better survey data, anecdotal evidence will have to do.

Go to a diner, bus stop, retirement home or even a college campus and almost invariably people will tell you that their vote counts. What does ‘count’ mean here?  It might mean they think their vote is important because it satisfies a civic duty to support democracy (but why would so many think this is the best way to discharge that duty unless they think their vote counts in the more literal sense). Or maybe it means they think their vote somehow encourages more people to vote (but why isn’t lying more efficient? And why would people get influenced into voting, unless they think it matters? ) Isn’t it possible to think that people actually believe their votes count?  But if this were true, how could we best make sense of it? One way is to bite the bullet and accept that (a lot of) people might just be irrational.

Voting does of course increase with education level, but this doesn’t defeat the claim that voters might be irrational. Most of our civic/political education in high school and college centers on the details of how democracy functions and why voting is important, and not on the trivial impact of our votes.

And remember the way that voting works in the U.S. at least—through some freaking inscrutable thing known as the electoral college. On my not so good days, I still have no idea how this works and, like most MR readers, have above average education. Does my vote count more in states with fewer delegates, or not at all in some locations, or because this is a republican state does this mean my vote for a democrat wouldn’t matter or would it matter more, and where is this school? My neuronal synapses die just a little.

Also, without voter irrationality it’s hard to make sense of the success of campaigns such as “a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush” in resonating with potential voters—the aim of these kinds of slogans is to encourage people to vote in a particular way. If people don’t believe their votes count, why would these slogans be effective and why would the slogan designers anticipate they would be effective? Harford seems to hint at this kind of problem when he points out that while voters don’t go to the polls to impact results, they don’t realize that what they do once they get to the booths doesn’t matter—but I wish he gave us his thoughts on this sort of inconsistency.

The fact that people don’t simply vote, but vote for a particular candidate, at best suggests that if people feel duty-bound it’s not to some abstract ideal but to particular parties and groups, which raises another, and not incompatible, potential motivation for voting.

Some might think that their votes count not individually, but as part of a group. Harford and other economists aside (including this one), people don’t always act on their (individual) self-interests.  (for just some examples, see Fehr and Fowler on altruistic punishment)

There are good evolutionary reasons to think that we frequently adopt the perspective of “what is good for us”.  You don’t have to believe in the group-selectionist theories of people like Sober and Wilson.

If that makes you feel dirty—selfish gene will get you there if there are enough genes shared in common among a group. And, a la Robert Frank, what starts out as emotional incentives to act on behalf of a fairly specified, narrowly defined, and kin-based group gets co-opted and extends (irrationally?) to larger, less cohesive groups. The group in this case would simply be the class of people thought to share the same values and beliefs.

Of course, like all evolutionary explanations, this is a just-so story and needs to be tested, but so does the rational voter idea. We still don’t have very good insight into the motives of voters, and until we do we should remain skeptical of any one model.

I’m not a hater--in many (maybe most) areas of life, the rational choice model makes damn good sense. In some areas of politics, however, emotions run high and irrationality can be bliss, and these may be areas where dynamic writers like Harford should resist the model a little.

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