How Irrational Are Voters?
Brian Doherty | May 29, 2007, 3:45pm
Some interesting press about a very interesting new book by Bryan Caplan, an economics professor at George Mason University: The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
The New York Times Magazine gives it a once-over, summing up its message thusly:
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?....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.
In defending democracy, theorists of public choice sometimes invoke what they call “the miracle of aggregation.” It might seem obvious that few voters fully understand the intricacies of, say, single-payer universal health care. (I certainly don’t.) But imagine, Caplan writes, that just 1 percent of voters are fully informed and the other 99 percent are so ignorant that they vote at random. In a campaign between two candidates, one of whom has an excellent health care plan and the other a horrible plan, the candidates evenly split the ignorant voters’ ballots. Since all the well-informed voters opt for the candidate with the good health care plan, she wins. Thus, even in a democracy composed almost exclusively of the ignorant, we achieve first-rate health care.
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.
The Times' author Gary J. Bass misses one of the book's most interesting ideas: the principle of "rational irrationality." This goes beyond the standard public choice concept of "rational ignorance" (where voters aren't educated on policy because it doesn't pay off personally for them to be so) to point out that, since people get some pleasure out of certain irrational beliefs, and in a voting process in which we have almost zero chance of affecting the outcome it doesn't particularly cost us anything to indulge them, people have economically sound reasons to not bother being rational when they vote. Indeed, they don't bother doing so, he maintains (with scads of evidence) in his book. I first referred to this concept of Caplan's in the pages of reason in this May 2003 review essay about public opinion research and democracy.
A review of Caplan's book in the lefty mag In These Times is in many ways a more thorough explanation of what Caplan has to say (author Christopher Hayes does understand and explain the centrality of "rational irrationality" to Caplan's thesis) and, despite ideological differences, gives some kudos:
It’s tempting to dismiss Caplan’s thesis out of hand, because it’s so self-consciously “provocative” and because he’s translating an old discredited anti-democratic argument into the jargon of econocentric elite-speak. But if you support democracy, you must confront the fact that voters can often be stunningly under-informed and that majoritarianism run amok can lead to persecution, hatred and injustice. Reading Caplan’s book, then, is both bracing and necessary because it forces the reader to stare into the abyss—an abyss the author seems only too happy to jump into.
Caplan blogs at Econlog. He contributed to a reason interview roundtable on the Federal Reserve in our November 2006 issue.
Russ R | May 29, 2007, 5:32pm | #
Democracy has one tremendous flaw... there is no proportionality between voting power, taxation, and benefits.
On one side, 25% of taxpayers with limited voting power contribute 85% total income taxes (
Source). However, being the highest earners, they receive very little in government benefits.
On the other side, the majority of the population pays less in taxes than it receives in benefits. As a result, they have every reason to support even greater government tax-and-spend welfare, knowing that they'll get the benefits, but won't have to pay for it. It's amazing how generous voters can be with someone else's money.
My proposal is to deal with it would be to redesign the voting franchise.
Yes... every citizen of the age of majority would still get to vote... (I'd even do away with the whole "citizenship" requirement and allow all taxpayers to vote) the only difference would be that each vote would be multiplied by the total amount of taxes paid by the voter since the last election.
This could most easily be accomplished at the municipal level, where typically the only taxes are on property, but it could just as easily be applied to federal and state income taxes. Sales taxes would be trickier, unless you're really good at keeping receipts.
The benefit of all this would hopefully be an end to ever-expanding welfare statism.
Your thoughts?
kevrob | May 29, 2007, 6:39pm | #
It may well be that voters aren't rational, or, at the very least, include both irrational and rational motives when deciding who to vote for, but that may only be true on a prospective basis.
Throw the bums out is a perfectly rational rule, assuming that those in office are, indeed, bums. Political scientists even have jargon for this. It's called
retrospective voting. Of course, the divil ye know may be better than the one that ye don't, but I'm sure we can all leaf through our history books and find examples of pols who either screwed up royally or happened to be in office when the country went through bad times, and got tossed out on their ears.
Consider some examples:
Truman couldn't bring the Korean War to a successful conclusion. His party let him know that it wasn't going to renominate him, and the electorate chose someone who played a huge part in winning the last war, Eisenhower.
Johnson had a similarly tough time over Viet Nam, and also chose not to run in 1968. Humphrey came within an eyelash of catching Nixon, but add in the Wallace vote and the "agins" beat the incumbent party handily.
Jimmy Carter lived and died by this voter tendency. Gerald Ford was punished for what Nixon did, and for the general state of the country in the stagflation 70s. Carter was in turn slapped down in 1980 for failing to solve the problems of inflation and unemployment. Reagan just topped 50%, but Carter only got 41%.
The Republicans, getting credit for an improved economy, won two Presidencies as the incumbent party. But when things turned a bit sour in the early 90s, George H.W. Bush couldn't hold their coalition together, and did even worse than Carter (37.4%.)
Then there are those instances of one or both houses of Congress flipping, especially at mid-term, which can signal dissatisfaction with the results of current policies. We'd probably see more of this if it weren't for the Incumbent Protection Acts - gerrymandered safe seats and campaign finance reform (sic.)
Does anyone who has read Caplan's book know how he deals with the theories of political scientists such as V.O. Key or Morris P. Fiorina?
Kevin
jh | May 30, 2007, 12:50am | #
For those folks who think that most voters are largely rational, let me disabuse you of that notion. I ran for office. I met with thousands of voters. Some of the more awe-inspiring moments on the campaign trail:
1) A voter in a rusted-out Datsun telling me she "always votes for whoever has the most yard signs up."
2) An lady in her late 90s who was quite proud of having always voted in every election for roughly 8 decades, and having marked her ballot for a Democrat in every single race (including a dead person, Patsy Mink)
3) Many, many people who told me they just voted for whoever was endorsed by the labor unions (who all endorsed the dead person, BTW).
4) Many people who asked just one question, and said they based their decision on that one answer (usually "are you against gay marriage?")
5) One person, who had an open door when I went up to his house, slamming his door and deadbolting it as soon as he saw what party label I had chosen
6) People with multiple yard signs of politicians with totally opposite political philosophies, but all of the same ethnicity
7) People who didn't know who their elected officials were, who proudly bragged that they never missed a chance to vote.
8) People with my opponent's yard sign up, saying they liked me and would vote for me, and also for that nice fellow whose sign was in their yard
9) A person who had my yard sign up, who called me up, furious at one position of dozens in my campaign mailer, and saying she would not vote for me even though she totally agreed with everything else in my brochure, and even though she had no idea where my opponent stood on that issue or any other
10) Did the mention the dead person thing?
kevrob | May 30, 2007, 11:38am | #
Mrs. Damar is smart. Where I live it is theoretically possible to elect a representative who is not a candidate of the Democratic party, but that has never happened in the over 30 years I have lived within the city limits. Our municipal and county elections are officially non-partisan, and we don't have voter registration by party, so perhaps there have been some secret Republicans elected from time to time. Our current county executive was a Republican state legislator, but he ran up his winning margin in the suburbs, and only got the chance to run when a long-term incumbent was ousted in a recall election made necessary by a financial scandal. Our state's senior Senator, a Democrat, is an entrenched millionaire incumbent, while the junior Senator, of the same party, could conceivably be defeated, but is also becoming an institution.
Urban politics being as they are, my Democratic state senator is sometimes accused by the local lefty activists of being a crypto-Republican, while my county supervisor shows up at the annual picnic of the Socialist party.
All of this is to say that, except for statewide elections, my interest in politics is essentially academic, which I suppose is somehow fitting. I do have an undergraduate degree in political science, and, given the fact that since I earned it I haven't been employed in a position that required that specific training, my interest in politics could essentially be considered a hobby.* I'd expect that to be true for many politically aware people who live in uncompetitive constituencies, if they are not part of the local majority. There's also the perverse effect that the combination of registration by party, closed primaries and partisan elections has. People who are sympathetic to the stated goals of a particular minority party often register as members of the dominant party so that they can participate in the only elections that matter, the dominant party's primaries.
No matter how ineffective my interest in politics may be, I don't think it is any more nonsensical than rooting for my favorite sports teams. Arguably, if I make a good a point about the local nine's pitching rotation, the manager is unlikely to be paying attention. If I want to make trenchant political comments to one of my representatives they might take heed, especially if they are unaware of how unlikely it is that I would ever vote for them.
Kevin
* I have run for office as a Libertarian candidate, which could be considered putting my degree to work. It was sorta like someone who has just earned an undergraduate degree in business administration applying for a top spot at a large firm that is certain to go to someone with a more impressive resume. Best case, I influenced the debate in those campaigns a bit, or the relative positioning of the various candidates.
Reason on Facebook
Reason on Twitter
Reason on YouTube
Reason RSS
