Vote By Your Principles, Not By Habit
Jeff Dulgar complains in the UC Santa Barbara student paper Daily Nexus that "Unwanted Libertarians Crash the Party". He admits that the LP "has become that cool new fad", but says to LP members that "you’ve rebelled against conventional politics, but you have effectively tossed your vote aside" because they "choose to vote for a party that will never get elected".
Let's explore the infamous "Wasted Vote Syndrome". For a vote to be "wasted", it has to be cast in vain, without furthering the purpose for which it was cast. So what are the reasons for which people vote? Why do they even vote at all?
This is a surprisingly difficult question -- difficult enough that economists call it the "Paradox of Voting" (or Downs Paradox, after the seminal 1957 paper by Anthony Downs). They observe that the cost of voting is relatively high compared to its objective benefit to the voter. To vote you have to invest up to an hour of your precious time -- analyze your choices, travel to a polling place, stand in a line or two, enter your choices, and travel back. (Voting by mail only changes the time calculation a little.) Your payoff from voting has to be discounted by the probability that your vote will tip the outcome of the election. Even if you expect the outcome of an election to have a big effect on your life, the odds that your vote will change that outcome are usually vanishingly small. When you do the math, you see that the net expected personal benefit to you from adding your vote to your candidate's total is far less than the cost of the gas it takes to get to the polls -- or even the cost of the stamp to mail your ballot.
The standard explanation, then, is that voting yields some kind of psychological benefit, apart from any coldly calculated material return on the effort invested. One component of that psychological benefit is surely the basic primate need to line up with the winning side. For most of the millions of years of hominid evolutionary history, lining up with the winning faction in the tribe was often potentially a matter of life or death. Even today we're usually under social pressure not to keep our voting preference a secret. Humans have enjoyed the secret ballot for only a few centuries, and that's not nearly long enough for us to shake the feeling that we better back somebody with a decent chance of actually taking over our tribe.
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Jeff Dulgar complains in the UC Santa Barbara student paper Daily Nexus that "Unwanted Libertarians Crash the Party". He admits that the LP "has become that cool new fad", but says to LP members that "you’ve rebelled against conventional politics, but you have effectively tossed your vote aside" because they "choose to vote for a party that will never get elected".
Let's explore the infamous "Wasted Vote Syndrome". For a vote to be "wasted", it has to be cast in vain, without furthering the purpose for which it was cast. So what are the reasons for which people vote? Why do they even vote at all?
This is a surprisingly difficult question -- difficult enough that economists call it the "Paradox of Voting" (or Downs Paradox, after the seminal 1957 paper by Anthony Downs). They observe that the cost of voting is relatively high compared to its objective benefit to the voter. To vote you have to invest up to an hour of your precious time -- analyze your choices, travel to a polling place, stand in a line or two, enter your choices, and travel back. (Voting by mail only changes the time calculation a little.) Your payoff from voting has to be discounted by the probability that your vote will tip the outcome of the election. Even if you expect the outcome of an election to have a big effect on your life, the odds that your vote will change that outcome are usually vanishingly small. When you do the math, you see that the net expected personal benefit to you from adding your vote to your candidate's total is far less than the cost of the gas it takes to get to the polls -- or even the cost of the stamp to mail your ballot.
The standard explanation, then, is that voting yields some kind of psychological benefit, apart from any coldly calculated material return on the effort invested. One component of that psychological benefit is surely the basic primate need to line up with the winning side. For most of the millions of years of hominid evolutionary history, lining up with the winning faction in the tribe was often potentially a matter of life or death. Even today we're usually under social pressure not to keep our voting preference a secret. Humans have enjoyed the secret ballot for only a few centuries, and that's not nearly long enough for us to shake the feeling that we better back somebody with a decent chance of actually taking over our tribe.
MORE...
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