Who votes and why?
It is an old joke: An elderly English lady tells an opinion survey, “I never vote, it only encourages them.”
With important elections on the horizon, I’d like to review two important issues:
(1) Who Votes and Why do They Vote?
(2) Why do People Vote Against Their Own Interests and Those of the Country?
Who Votes and Why Do They Vote?
People often feel strongly about voting or not voting. Why is this?
Research has long established that voting in major elections cannot usually be explained in terms of the ‘selfish’ benefits of voting to the individual[i]. That is, the probability that one person’s vote will be decisive is too low for voting to be ‘worth it’ to the individual voter (in an expected utility sense[ii]). In most cases your probability of being murdered by a Ninja warrior on the way to the poll is probably higher than the probability that your vote will be decisive.
You can liken the logic of voting to that of the logic of buying a lottery ticket; one’s probability of winning the lottery may be one in millions, but someone who buys a ticket has to win. Why not you? In an election, someone’s vote must count. In my electoral district in the federal election of 2011 the winning candidate won by only 18 votes. I knew the handful of people who voted to make the difference. (Well, OK, not necessarily those people, but if they hadn’t voted their guy would have lost. Right?)
Much of the interest in the psychology of voting can be traced to an equation developed by a non-psychologist in 1957[iii]. That equation has influenced research in this area since[iv]. The reason that I want to share this equation with you is that it draws statistics, political science, and psychology together. Skip to the next paragraph if this bores you.
The equation is:
R = (B)(P) - C + D
where,
R is the reward a person will gains from voting; if R is positive, the voter is assumed to gain a reward from voting that outweighs the costs and will therefore cast a vote. The more positive R is, the more likely an individual is to vote.
B is the benefit(s) a person thinks will be gained if his candidate wins,
P is the person’s perception of how much his vote will ‘count’,
C is the cost to the individual of voting in terms of such things as time, inconvenience, and money, and
D is the ‘psychic satisfaction’ the person would gain from voting.
This brings us to what is called the paradox of not voting. That is, considering this equation; unless you are likely to get a huge benefit from voting, or you think that the election will be won by a razor thin margin and your vote will therefore count a great deal, and the cost for you to vote is reasonable relative to this benefit, and you get great ‘psychic satisfaction’ from voting, it wouldn’t make sense for you to vote. That is, the reward is too small. But for most people the reward would be too small most of the time, and yet, in the United States and Canada, around two thirds of eligible voters vote.
The statistics of game theory, utility analysis, and related models have tried to explain why people vote[v]. None thoroughly does. In the end, we are left asking, ‘why do people continue to vote?’
Who votes? Extensive reviews and metanalyses of the ‘softer’* research suggest the following[vi]:
° People are mainly motivated by the ‘expressive act of voting’. That is, that there is a personal ‘utility gain’ from expressing an opinion through voting.
° People are socialized to vote and believe that it is important to vote in order to ‘preserve democracy.’ In other words, the social norm is to vote, and some feel that they will meet with the disapproval of others if they don’t vote.
° People who are smarter, wealthier, older (to a point), live rurally, are married, and are involved in their communities are more likely to vote4.
Why do they vote? A relatively recent book by Blais and Daoust[vii], argues that there are just four primary reasons which motivate an individual to vote. These are:
1. Political interest (i.e., an interest in things political)
2. Sense of civic duty
3. Perceived importance of the election
4. Ease of voting (for them, specifically)
One of the authors, André Blais, was a principal investigator of research project with economists, political scientists, and psychologists from Canada, Europe, and the United States which examined the behaviour of voters and political parties.
Whatever the reasons, over half the eligible populations vote in elections in Canada, Europe, and the United States. Maybe a more important question than Who Votes and Why?, is Why Do People so Often Vote Against Their Own Self-Interests?
Why Do People Vote Against Their Own Interests and Those of the Country?
About half the voters in the US appear poised to vote for a woman who wants to try to legislate against the First and Second Amendments (at least). Why would a person vote for a dangerous, Marxist zealot? Why would over half of Canadians vote for a political party which wants to seize the firearms of law-abiding citizens and criminalize speech it doesn’t like?
Curiously, and stunningly, the answer seems to be that most self-interest measures “have very little effect in determining either policy preferences or voting behavior” [viii]. This appears to have changed little from the article in 1980 from which that quotation is taken.
It seems that what the authors call ‘symbolic attitudes’ (like a generally liberal ideology or political party identification) are what determines how people vote. Self-interest and political sophistication related to issues appear to have almost no effect on how a person votes. Whether you identify as a ‘Lib’ or a ‘Dem’ appear to be more important. For liberals a corrupt and biased media that promote one’s established party affiliation and ideological view self-perpetuates one’s personal voting decision.
So sadly, that, in a nutshell, is why people vote against their own interests and those of the country.
* By ‘softer’ I only mean less statistically-oriented.
[i] Dowding, K. (2005). Is it rational to vote? Five types of answer and a suggestion. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 7(3), 442-459.
[ii] Edlin, A., Gelman, A., & Kaplan, N. (2007). Voting as a rational choice. Rationality and Society, 19(3), 293–314. https://doi.org/10.1177/1043463107077384
[iii] Downs, A. (1957). An economic theory of democracy. New York: Harper & Row.
[iv] Harder, J., & Krosnick, J. A. (2008). Why do people vote? A psychological analysis of the causes of voter turnout. Journal of Social Issues, 64(3), 525–549. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2008.00576.x
[v] Krueger, J. I., & Acevedo, M. (2008). A game-theoretic view of voting. Journal of Social Issues, 64(3), 467–485. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4560.2008.00573.x
[vi] Carlsson, F., & Johansson-Stenman, O. (2010). Why do you vote and vote as you do? Kyklos, 63(4), 495–516. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6435.2010.00475.x
[vii] Blais, A., & Daoust, J. F. (2020). The motivation to vote: Explaining electoral participation. UBC Press. https://books.google.ca/books?id=IDHNDwAAQBAJ
[viii] Sears, D. O., Lau, R. R., Tyler, T. R., & Allen, H. M. (1980). Self-Interest vs. Symbolic Politics in Policy Attitudes and Presidential Voting. American Political Science Review, 74(3), 670–684. Cambridge Core. https://doi.org/10.2307/1958149