Voting as an irrational act

I needed to vote early this morning, because I’m teaching and then immediately leaving for Washington. I arrived at my small polling station in Concord, Mass., at 6:45 am, fifteen minutes before the polls opened, and there were already about 20 people in line ahead of me. I was able to vote quickly – done by 7:10 a.m. – and when I left the polling place, there were maybe 40 people waiting in line. (My younger daughter emailed me a little later in the morning that she had been waiting in line for an hour.) However, this is of course modest compared with the stories of people waiting 6 to 8 hours in line to vote early in Florida, for example. And I have already seen Facebook posts this morning about people waiting an hour in line or more.

The lines to vote are an interesting commentary – and critique – of two common and influential ideas from social science research and theory.

One is the idea of free riding. There is actually an academic literature about why it is irrational for any individual to vote. It is highly unlikely that an individual vote will determine the outcome of an election – indeed, even in the famous 2000 Florida case, there were several hundred votes separating the candidates. So, it has been noted, no individual should vote, but instead count on everyone else to vote. The paradox, of course, is that if everyone thinks this way, nobody will vote at all. We do know that people do vote, so the challenge for social science theorists has been to think about why people vote even though, from a self-interest perspective – voting has costs, especially with these long lines, and there is only an infinitesimal chance that an individual’s vote will elect their favored candidate.

The answer has to be some version of people feeling a moral obligation to vote and people feeling proud as individuals to participate in democracy. There is a larger point here. The theory that people will not vote because the self-interested costs outweigh the self-interested benefits reflects an impoverished view of what makes people tick – ignoring the role of moral obligations and attachments to a larger community. So these lines on election day actually tell us something about who we are as human beings.

The second idea that is dealt something of a blow by these voting lines is the psychological idea of habituation – put simply, the idea that everything gets old after a while. On this view, it is one thing when people in new democracies wait in line for hours to vote (I remember the footage of long lines when South Africa had its first universal suffrage election in the nineties), but after a while it loses novelty and hence attractiveness. Needless to say, Americans have been at democracy for a long time, so habituation certainly has had time to settle in. But there may be certain things we value on an ongoing basis, such that we continue to appreciate them even after a long time, sort of like a long-standing love as opposed to a first blush of attraction.

And this also may be something we want to pass on to our children: I overheard at the train station on the way to work a woman telling other commuters about how there was a first-time voter in line while she was waiting, and everybody gave her a big cheer.

Having said all this, it is of course also true that many Americans do not vote, that many feel cynical and jaded, that many are both self-interested and habituated. Today, though, let’s concentrate on those exceptions to social science theory.