Why Should People Vote?

Ancient Athenian leader Pericles gave in what was a speech for honoring the dead from war a defense of democracy which has surpassed the time for which he spoke in. Pericles defended democracy from the common criticism that the liberality of democracy leads to a decline in moral virtue among the citizenry, namely towards selfishness. "The freedom which we enjoy in our government extends also to our ordinary life. There, far from exercising a jealous surveillance over each other, we do not feel called upon to be angry with our neighbor for doing what he likes, or even to indulge in those injurious looks which cannot fail to be offensive, although they inflict no positive penalty". We trust everyone else to make decisions over us because in some sense we see each other as equals, so we trust individuals to rule their own affairs we trust them to rule over each other. However, despite Pericles' rhetoric, ancient Athens did not grant the kind of equality we understand today. Females and non-citizens did not have any rights, as equality was seen as only between equals, meaning those who already had power in society. Today while one person one vote has been established, the increased partisanship of the system has many voters questioning the sensibility of the other half of the country. If we do not agree with the ideology of the other, how can we extend this to their wisdom in the ballot box? This is I believe a misunderstanding of what democracy is good for. The good of having elections isn't to impart wisdom to rulers but to establish legitimacy, by going through the motions of competitive fair elections. Given data from the social sciences, the outcome of an election and individual voter opinions are largely decided beforehand. We should trust the opinions of voters not as being wise enough to decide the common good but wise enough to express their approval or disapproval of government from their own point of view.

Kenneth Arrow in his 1951 book Social Choice and Individual Values demonstrated in that individual voters can choose an outcome which is not for the public good as defined by their own choices. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem states that a clear order of voter preferences cannot be determined if voters have three or more choices. Formally put an election with fair rules without a dictator will not reflect the preferences of a social group. These fair rules are that every vote is equal to the other one, what a majority prefers is the winner, and no single voter can determine the group's preferences (their choices are independent). From these rules, this situation can happen:
5 votes A > B > C
4 votes B > C > A
3 votes C > A > B
Candidate A is the winner by getting the most votes, yet candidate C is preferred by more voters than A for all voters and would win 7:5 if candidate B did not run. The majority preference did not win because of democratic rules. Even in America's two party system this has happened several times at the Presidential level. In 1912 two Republicans were on the ballot, William Taft and Theodore Roosevelt running on a third party ticket, splitting the vote and giving Democrat Woodrow Wilson the presidency with less than a majority of voters, 42%. This happened again in 1992 where independent Ross Perot ran against incumbent George Bush and Bill Clinton. Perot's 19% of the vote, hurting Bush more than Clinton, allowed Clinton to become President with 43% of the popular vote. In Florida, George Bush Jr. won by only 500 votes against Al Gore. Third party candidate Ralph Nader took 97,488 votes, far more than enough to guarantee Gore victory. There is no doubt most of these voters would rather choose Gore than Bush in a three way race, yet they helped elect the candidate the least wanted winning. The point of Arrow's theorem is to demonstrate how easy it is for the system itself to decide an election and not the will of voters. Even if voters did make the right decision, it may not matter anyway.

Political socialization theory demonstrates that by the time we make it to voting age, our minds have been shaped in important ways by our social environment. There is a strong correlation between the party identification of parents and that of the child when they hit adulthood. Given that party identification is thought to be the greatest predictor of voter behavior, much of our political orientation is decided before we are able to cast a ballot. One can predict an individual's vote just by knowing their demographic profile. Black Americans vote for the Democratic Party nearly 90% of the time, Latinos 60-70% Democrat, and Whites close to 60% Republican. Males lean more Republican and women Democratic. By the time anyone heads to a poll their vote can be predicted. Political psychology has cast doubt on whether political opinions can even conform with reality. When misinformed voters are presented with facts, they don’t change their opinions (Keohane 2010). They actually dig deeper into their beliefs.

Given that voters decide their vote from factors not relating to individual campaigns and may not be able to get an outcome in accordance with their preferences, why should we give the public the power to decide who gets into office and influence policy? Its because voters are wise enough to know how their own life is going. The electorate is wiser than politicians and pundits about what they want. Economist Jude Wanniski made this point in his The Way the World Works. He subscribed to the wisdom of crowds in politics. “The electorate as a whole is wiser than any individual member in understanding its interests, it is wiser than any economist or group of economists.” Wanniski’s model described voters as wanting a balance of economic growth and redistribution which only the electorate as a whole could know. Their vote is an approval or disapproval of a state of affairs, not made in hindsight using abstract knowledge. The job of the politician is to listen and sell their ability to listen, not to direct public opinion. A candidate is successful if they can clinch enough voters to win. This a narrow view of what voters are capable of, so voters should be restricted to expressing a preference and not be expected to make particular decisions. This is the essence of a representative democracy.

(For a political behavior and elections class)