DISSIDENT No. 3
POLITICS AND DEMOCRACY
Everything You Know About Politics
Wal-Mart: The Big Friendly Giant
BOOKS + IDEAS + PROVOCATIONS
Islamic Democracy; An Exercise in Futility?
The Wisdom of Markets Isn't the Wisdom of Crowds
Hunters, Liars, and Philosopher Kings
Modern Economics as a Flight from Reality
ARCHIVE
BY RYAN BRUMBERG IT’S NOT LOGICAL TO VOTE. YET MILLIONS AND MILLIONS of people do it. Why? William Riker and Peter Ordeshook calculated the probability that an individual voter will affect the outcome of a large election as roughly 10-8, or .0000001. A probability this small is as close to impossible as anything in human life, and as Bernoulli and Buffon put it, “all reasonable men regularly treat it as a ‘moral certainty.’” If a rational person were attempting to calculate the costs and benefits of voting, he would have to consider the fact that the odds of his being killed in a car accident on his way to the polling station are substantially higher than the odds of his vote affecting the election. He might then consider whether his continuing to live might be of any value to himself, his family, or anyone else. If he thinks so, then he might conclude that he has a responsibility not to vote. The 2000 Presidential election suggests that even in the closest of contests, a single person’s vote will not change the results. In fact, the Florida election fiasco shows that even in the rare case when a few hundred votes — albeit, not one vote — can make a difference, a small but important fraction of the total vote is lost or miscounted. Depending on whether an election is presidential or congressional, and depending on the type of machine employed to read the ballots, the rate of ballots that are either misread or thrown out seems to have ranged from about 1.5 percent of the vote at best to 7.6 percent at worst. In most elections, where one candidate wins by a significant percentage, counting errors affect both candidates (if not always in equal proportion) and do not change the election’s outcome. But in any race won by such a large margin, a single vote can have no effect anyway. It might seem that, as the margin separating the candidates decreases, the possibility that a single vote may swing an election increases. Yet in close elections, the effect of ballot-counting error becomes enormous. Take an election in which 10 million votes are cast. An extremely close vote would give one candidate 49.99 percent of the vote, and the other candidate 50.01 percent of the vote — a margin of 2000 votes. The predicted vote-counting error in such an election would be at least 100,000 votes. Any asymmetric error in ballot counting will overwhelm the importance of an individual vote in determining the outcome. One reason that voting in mass elections is irrational, then, is that one person’s vote almost literally never can affect the outcome of such an election. Another reason is that elections are “public goods.” In other words, any benefits derived from an election are available to everyone, regardless of their contribution. If the benefits of elections and voting are divorced from the contributions of voters, why should anyone contribute their vote? Although a taxpayer’s individual contribution to the maintenance of public goods like military defense (through the payment of taxes) is relatively tiny, it does incrementally increase the total funding for defense and therefore have a real (however minor) impact. With public goods like elections, however, this is not the case. In winner-take-all elections such as those we hold in the United States, it does not matter whether a candidate wins by 5 votes or by 5 million; a win is a win. One vote more for a candidate makes zero difference — unless it is the vote that decides whether he wins or loses. Faced with these facts, some supporters of voting shift to a sort of pseudo-Kantian argument, along the following lines: If everyone in your party chose not to vote, the party would lose; and if everyone in the electorate chose not to vote, democracy itself would fail. We should act as we’d want everyone to act, for if nobody acted that way, the results would be disastrous. Kant was too good a philosopher to make such an argument. His categorical imperatives were supposed to apply, regardless of the consequences of one person’s — or everyone’s — obedience to them. It would be good Kantianism to say that people have an unconditional obligation to vote, regardless of the consequences. It’s quite different to say that the obligation to vote is conditioned on consequences — especially consequences that are entirely fanciful. Why should someone vote out of concern for the “disaster” of everyone abstaining when, in fact, what’s at issue is just one person abstaining? One person’s decision to vote won’t affect whether everyone else votes. There’s no point in acting to head off a nonexistent disaster that will, in any case, be unaffected by your action or inaction. BRING IN THE PSYCHOLOGISTS Psychologists have gone some way toward explaining why people underestimate the odds against their vote making a difference, and why they may confuse the consequences of their own abstention from voting with the consequences of everyone’s abstention. As Melissa Acevedo and Joachim Krueger write, people “expect their own behaviors to matter.” These researchers found two psychological mechanisms that cause people to overestimate the value of their own votes. The first is the voter’s illusion, “which occurs when people project their own intentions to either vote or abstain more strongly on similar others (i.e., supporters of the same party) than on dissimilar others.” This version of the pseudo-Kantian imperative “inspires greater optimism regarding the election outcome when voting rather than abstention is being considered.” Even in controlled experiments where study participants were given identical information about a hypothetical election in a hypothetical nation, they “thought that victory was more likely if they themselves voted.” Some psychologists posit that the voter’s illusion might arise because voters believe their votes will actually induce “everyone else” to vote. Others, like Acevedo and Krueger, dismiss this as magical thinking and credit voters with more intelligence. They posit the following explanation for the voter’s illusion: When considering voting, the person expects victory, and may be tempted to conclude that his or her individual vote is not needed. If that person then decides to abstain, this change of mind may also be projected to likeminded others, resulting in the expectation of defeat. One way in which a person can avert a cycle of changing forecasts contingent on changes of mind is to freeze deliberations when the forecast is good. Going out to vote may then appear to be a small price to pay for optimism. While the voter’s illusion may help explain why people vote, it is still an illusion, and Acevedo and Krueger’s explanation for the illusion is no more logical from the voter’s perspective (rather than the psychologist’s) than pseudo-Kantianism is. We are faced, then, with the question of why people have this illusion. Part of the answer may lie in the second mechanism cited by Acevedo and Kreuger, the delusion of personal relevance. This is “the belief that individual votes matter regardless of their predictive value for the behavior of others.” Where might people get the idea that, out of tens of millions of people in a modern electorate, their vote is significant enough to tilt the election all by itself? It may be that people are used to participating in small-scale cooperative situations where their actions have a readily perceivable effect on the overall outcome. Then, when they face a much larger-scale cooperative problem, where the effect (or non-effect) of their actions is less easy to perceive, they use familiar small-scale cooperative solutions as their model, inappropriately transferring a belief in personal relevance to the national scale. I doubt, though, whether this clears up the mystery of why people vote. The voter’s illusion and the delusion of personal relevance may be real, but they seem to be fallback defenses that people use when they’re challenged about the rationality of voting. Normally, people vote in the same way they do a lot of things: unthinkingly. That’s not to say that they don’t think about who to vote for; but they don’t seem to think much about whether voting itself makes sense. This puts voting into the category of socially approved norms, about which some very enlightening things have recently begun to be said. EVOLUTION AND VOTING One of the primary new tools of social science is the evolutionary psychologists’ theory of reciprocal altruism. This theory holds that that by helping an unrelated individual, one’s own survival chances increase, as long as one can reasonably expect the other to later return the favor. In groups where people can remember who cooperates with whom, those people with an inborn tendency to cooperate should therefore be more successful at surviving until they reproduce, and more successful at nurturing their young so that they, in turn, can survive to reproduce. In the process, these cooperative individuals inadvertently pass down the cooperation gene — to us. Mathematicians Martin Nowak and Karl Sigmund have gone a step farther, developing a theory of indirect reciprocity. In this view, “people are willing to help someone who won’t pay them back as long as other people see the charitable act. The generous person, in this case, builds a reputation for cooperation, and others who observe this behavior are more likely to cooperate with him or her.” Nowak and Sigmund’s theory of motivation is borne out by cooperation-game experiments that do not grant participants anonymity. In these experiments, a reputation for generosity becomes a powerful factor in determining people’s behavior in successive rounds of the experiment. Given the opportunity in these experiments to pay the additional cost of being charitable versus freeloading off of others, the participants’ concern for a good reputation becomes an end in itself. In pursuit of this end, people’s cooperative behavior increases substantially — in some studies, the proportion of cooperators leaps from 50 percent to 80 percent of the participants. The theory of indirect reciprocity points to a possible genetic cause of this demonstrated concern for a charitable reputation. Many studies have found that in the real world, taking the actions that produce a reputation for generosity would, within limits, benefit those with that charitable reputation. Computer models have shown that both decision makers who always cooperate and those who never cooperate fare poorly when pitted against those who are called “discerning cooperators” — who, in the simplest case, are charitable to fellow cooperators, but punish those who do not cooperate. (Keep in mind the key role played by punishing non-cooperators.) If people thereby strike a middle ground between always pursuing selfish benefits and always cooperating with others, they may be able to reap the benefits of repeated cooperation without being taken advantage of. Unlike rigorous cost-benefit calculation — which may have a high cost in wasted time, a low chance of success, and a high likelihood of alienating those seeking one’s aid — the middle ground lets an individual cursorily examine the cost of cooperating and, as long as it does not appear onerous, cooperate. Alternatively, the individual could simply remember if past cooperative ventures with other individuals or the group as a whole worked out well, and use this memory as a guide. (This last strategy works well in small groups, but loses utility as group size increases.) However, even if most people are endowed by evolution with a strong inclination to help those who will reciprocate, this seems inadequate to explain why they will commit acts like voting, which are only metaphorically charitable. Voting is anonymous and, statistically speaking, it delivers no benefits to oneself or the group. Some other power must combine with the instinct for reciprocal charity, or the instinct to gain the reputation for charitability, to explain voting. GROUP NORMS, RELIGION, AND DEMOCRACY As with species, norms may evolve because of selection pressures. That is, while a group may adopt any norm it wants, a group that follows norms that decrease fitness will eventually be supplanted by groups with fitnessenhancing norms. Though particulars vary, human norms broadly inhibit people from thinking and acting purely out of rational self-interest. Such norms help forestall and sidestep many problems — like the disincentive for people to contribute to public goods. However, such norms also give the groups that foster them certain vulnerabilities, such as exploitation by free riders. This dilemma is often addressed by social sanctions. As noted, people like to punish others who violate group norms. In experimental settings in which reciprocity rules (I’ll give you money now, if you give me money later on) emerge as group norms over successive rounds of “play,” players who take advantage of each other by breaking the rules are punished afterwards, even when punishing them cannot benefit the punishers. This desire and willingness to punish those who violate group norms seems to stem not from any logic of self-interest, but from an innate sense of fairness that may, overall, serve the self-interest of the species. Frans de Waal and Sarah Brosnan have demonstrated that even capuchin monkeys have a keen sense of fairness. They found that when a capuchin sees others receiving greater rewards than he himself is receiving for the same behavior, he will stop performing the action, even at the expense of losing any rewards at all. This is the same sort of apparently self-destructive, irrational behavior that so often animates our own species. Yet the fact that so many humans and non-human primates share this tendency suggests that the trait may have persisted because it has a positive effect on the survival chances of those who inherit it. What has this got to do with voting? As far as one could get from an American polling station — in Bali — the inherent instinct for fairness offers insights into why people will troop to the polls on November 7. Most Balinese depend on massive irrigation systems to water their fields of rice. For downstream farmers to survive, a “fair share” of water for upstream farmers must be calculated and adhered to. In addition, pest control, which entails the burning or flooding of many miles of fields to prevent the pests from simply moving from one place to another, requires many farming communities to cooperate. The mechanism to produce all the required cooperation lies not in Bali’s government — its agricultural and political spheres are largely independent — but, rather, in its religion. The hierarchal nature of this religion corresponds to the nature of the irrigation system. Large irrigation points stand next to large temples that are hierarchically above the lower-lying, smaller temples and their waterways. When important collective choices are required, such as which sections of field must remain fallow for the season or which areas must be burned, they are made by successive levels of the temple hierarchy. At the top of the pyramid, a high priest who is the living messenger of the water goddess, and his staff, serve as the authoritative experts not only in ritual and theology, but in irrigation and conflict resolution. The result of the interdependent agricultural and religious practices of Bali is that individual farmers and farming communities often take actions against their own self-interest. A single farmer surreptitiously using more than his share of water could greatly benefit, at an inconsequential cost to anyone else. Communities upstream could use more than their allotment of water and get richer. Yet while some people do violate the group norms set by the temple hierarchy, the great majority do not. This legally unenforced system yielded a greater rate of cooperation than when the Asian Development Bank attempted to supplant it with high technology and bureaucratic decision making during the Green Revolution. Crop yields fell drastically and the system collapsed. Religious belief is, of course, very common. What might its evolutionary benefits be, especially in light of the high costs religion often demands of its adherents? An omnipresent being with the supernatural ability to perceive and punish violations may hint at the answer: What better way to enforce otherwise unenforceable norms than to convince people that God is watching them? But that’s not the only way religion can motivate “good behavior.” Even people who don’t believe that an external being is watching their actions can achieve the same effect by monitoring themselves — if they are convinced that the forbidden actions are truly wrong. The religious claim to absolute truth can be just as effective in enforcing behavioral codes as can their imagined enforcement by God. Democracy, too, has behavioral codes that need to be self-policed. People’s belief in the sanctity of the norms of democracy reinforces their already existing altruistic tendencies. It helps ensure that they police themselves to perform the normative rituals of democracy — such as voting — even though these rituals are of no help to themselves or to anyone else. People act as if they believe that their votes are decisive even if they don’t really hold an exaggerated sense of their actions’ importance, or posit a quasi-magical connection between their votes and those of millions of other citizens. Why do they behave as if they believe that their votes matter? matter? Because they have been taught that voting is an obligation of citizenship. Because this axiom is at the heart of the democratic creed, people raised in this creed are impervious to any evidence or reasoning about the inconsequentiality of their votes. Faith in democracy, like faith in a supernatural being, is outside the scope of reason, oblivious to its power — and this faith is, therefore, an effective enforcer of norms. By contrast, any norm that is subject to shifting calculations of the odds will not be very reliable. This does not answer the question of why some people raised in democracies fail to obey its ceremonial commands. I can’t explain why some of us are believers and others are cynics, when it comes to either religion proper or to the democratic religion. What I do know is that for those who believe in the democratic religion, democratic truths enforce norms of voting without the need for any sanction — and, by the same token, without the need for any reason. People may not understand how their lone vote will have an impact in an electorate of millions, but they behave as if they think that somehow it will. Forcing them to produce reasons for this behavior is a category mistake: voters vote because they’ve been taught by their group that voting is a norm. As members of a species that has survived through intra-group cooperation, they are prone to having the trait of wanting to do their part to uphold group norms. When pressed, voters may produce ex post facto justifications for their behavior — along pseudo-Kantian lines, for instance — but these afterthoughts are like the claim of Reform Jews that they keep kosher because of its health benefits. The real reason that they keep kosher, of course, is that they have been taught that to obey the collectively promulgated norms of kashrut is to obey the will of God. In such ways, the gene for social cooperation is seized upon by every kind of culturally transmitted religion, which can induce human beings to take individually irrational actions precisely because they are individually irrational — but collectively promulgated. That is the essence of faith; its ritual acts are those of collective endeavor. To demand justification for religious rituals will
prompt people to produce rationalizations, not reasons.
And in the democratic religion, the ultimate ritual is
the act of voting.
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