The Rational Irrational Voter
Yesterday, guestblogger E.C. Gach asked:
So the question I leave to you is, are Americans driven to crappy prime time sitcoms to escape the mess that is our national politics, or is our national politics a mess because Americans cannot spare a night of crappy sitcoms to deal, even superficially, with the political issues facing them?
Easy: Both! And neither.
Jamelle Bouie, in an unrelated post, touched on a big part of the problem yesterday:
To choose correctly for a judicial position, a voter would have to know when that judge was appointed, who appointed her, and how she has performed on the bench. To do this for more than a dozen candidates across five different courts is beyond a tall order; it’s insane. A well-informed voter — our editorial assistant, for example — could easily spend hours sorting through candidates and positions, assuming the information is on the Web and readily available. I can’t imagine how the average low-information voter would fare; odds are good that he wouldn’t bother to vote for most offices.
And therein lies the problem. Elections are a way to hold our leaders accountable, but we have a limited capacity for accountability. There’s only so much attention to go around, most people — even political junkies — don’t have the time, ability, or inclination to evaluate a dozen-plus candidates. For most people, the rational choice is just to choose a few candidates to focus on, and go from there. A whole group of other, obscure candidates are left to their own devices, and can keep themselves in office without actually having to account for anything to the mass of voters.
American voters aren’t unusually lazy and uninformed, they’re just caught in a system where making a rational decision requires a huge investment of time and self-motivation. Formulating even a half-informed picture of the state of modern American politics means not just sifting through huge piles of information, but having enough context and training to separate the bad information from the good and form a nuanced interpretation of the latter. Unless you work in politics full-time, or are a hardcore news junkie — and either way, I feel your pain — then there are much better things you could be doing with your time.
In Poli Sci 101, we’re asked to weigh the opportunity cost of driving all the way to a polling place and standing in line to vote against the infinitesimally small impact made by a single ballot. The conclusion: voting is irrational. And if that’s the case, imagine how much more irrational it is to do a ton of research beforehand to make sure you make a well-informed decision in the voting booth. For most people, it’s actually more rational to vote irrationally.
Since I never took PoliSci 101: once you’ve determined that voting is irrational, are you still supposed to do it? It seems like you’ve got three options from here: (1) argue that the irrationality is only apparent, (2) argue that it’s important to do some irrational things, or (3) argue that people shouldn’t vote unless the pleasure of the act of voting outweighs the time spent waiting in line. I’m curious about which of these you would go for, or whether I’ve missed an option.Report
@William Brafford,
I’d tentatively go with your second option. Here’s why.
It’s sometimes important to do irrational things, like voting, because while voting may be irrational as to the specific decisions I make, voting is supremely rational when viewed from the perspective of my (and your) long-term self-interest — regardless of my choice of candidate.
Orderly transitions of power are good for everyone. Protracted violent struggles over political power might just be the very worst things in the entire modern world. To avoid them, we should legitimize democracy, even if our choices within democracy are obviously, crudely, and necessarily irrational.Report
@Jason Kuznicki, I agree, but it would help if we were allowed to vote on civil servants, the CIA, our local beat cops, etc.Report
@Rufus F.,
Because we don’t see violent struggles over who gets what civil service job anymore, I’m not inclined to agree. We have at least a sufficient amount of democracy to legitimize the rest, and possibly an excess of democracy, at least if it’s just this one purpose that we’re considering.Report
@William Brafford,
I’d argue for 3, actually, though “pleasure” is the wrong word…it’s more like a sense of fulfilling a responsibility or moral duty (neither of which are purely rational things) than something that brings happiness.
About half of all people in the US usually don’t vote. And they’re right not to.Report
Ned, I think this actually goes a long way to explain why it is that so much of what political campaigns turn out is feel-good pablum instead of policies, and nicely advances the discussion E.C. got rolling.
This analogizes to how I’ve seen people behave when picking professionals for other purposes — doctors, lawyers, accountants. The quality of services that the professional provides are far down in the selection criteria, because laypeople do not know how to determine whether a professional is good at her job or not; even if they had the specialized education necessary to really tell, they lack information about the professional’s past performance to do so. At best, they might have information about the results of a professional’s past work, but that says nothing about the level of challenge that past problems raised. An apparently good record may conceal an experiential background of never confronting anything difficult (a prosecutor is likely to have a near 100% conviction rate if he plea-bargains out all his petty drug dealers and streetwalkers so the conviction rate says nothing meaningful about his skill as a lawyer); an apparently poor record may reflect better-than-predicted success at dealing with intractable issues (oncologists lose lots of patients but that doesn’t make them bad doctors).
So maybe selecting a legislative representative, or even a President, is like picking an accountant or a stockbroker — you rely on things that seem irrational, like whether they have a good “bedside manner,” are trusted and liked by people you trust, or you go to the person that some larger organization (your insurance company in the case of your doctor, or your preferred political party in the case of your legislator) has referred you.Report
@Transplanted Lawyer, I think that’s a good analogy, and thinking about it I do pick politicians more or less the same way I pick other professional services. You want reliability, in the sense of saying what you’re going to do and then doing it and not lying about it afterwards. You want clarity, in the sense of being able to explain technical issues to a reasonably smart person. And you want believability, in that they shouldn’t be promising anything that’s known to be impossible. Unfortunately I don’t know of any politicians who meet these criteria …Report
My preferred take is one of Federalism. Small, local governments that are responsive to the local voters.
I personally think that my mayor ought to have more of an impact on my life than my governor, and my governor ought to have *MUCH* more of an impact on my life than my president. (Note: This shouldn’t translate to a quantitatively large impact in any case.)
If my mayor is particularly distasteful, I can show up at a meeting and ask questions. I can run against him. If that’s over the top, I can help campaign for the people running against him. And if it turns out that the majority of my neighbors actually like the guy… I can move without having to move to Somalia. Instead of living in Springfield, I can move to Shelbyville.
If it turns out that my entire state is corrupt (e.g., Idaho), I can move to a state with a different Governor without having to move to Somalia.
And the best part is that the people who have the most impact upon my life are the ones most easily petitioned and/or voted out and/or moved away from. This makes research exceptionally easy… and mistakes exceptionally easy to fix.Report
@Jaybird, I absolutely agree. The more we can have the system attuned to local, personal knowledge, the lower the error rate will be.Report
@Jaybird, I also agree. It bother’s me to no end how much more attention many people seem to pay to federal elections, despite the impact of decisions made at the made at the school board or city council level.
Land development, community planning, etc. all have a large (I’m hesitant to say larger) impact on people’s day to day lives, and people’s ability to affect change at the level is exponentially more than in statewide/national elections.
At one time there was a lot of talk about how cable television would allow that many more platforms to explore niche interests, both in terms of news and entertainment. The same thing was said about the internet. It being a much more complicated medium, I’ll try not to make any blanket statements, but it seems like the internet has magnified people’s interest in the “big” stories just as much if not more than it has fostered communication on local ones.
Local papers are being gobbled up, and the dot com replacements don’t seem to have picked up the slack yet. As a result, whereas you’d think there would be more transparency at the local level, most of the public that pays attention at all spends uber amounts of time watching the MSM dissect nonsense just because it happens at the national level.
Any one disagree? And what needs to happen in order for the emphasis to be put back on people’s own front yards?Report
I would offer the response of Homer (not the bard) to basically the same question: “Movies are the only escape from the drudgery of work and family. No offense.”Report