Its quite simple. Voting is irrational. The probability that your vote is pivotal is about inversely proportionate to the voting population size.
That means any expected reward you get from voting is small. Even in a school board election there are often thousands of participants.
When people start voting for non selfish reasons they’re only going to devote a small amount of time to essentially a charitable or recreational activity. They’re not going to get informed. They’re not going to make a deep dive.
The cost of voting is greater than the benefit you receive, including whatever good feelings you get from doing your duty, supporting the good guys, etc.
The cost still outweighs the benefit even after taking into account the total expected benefit to other people, multiplied by however much you care about this.
For someone who feels good about voting, it can be a rational thing to do even if the probability of affecting the result is negligible or zero. And for someone who finds voting annoying but cares a significant amount about others who will be affected by the result, it’s entirely possible for voting to be rational. Generally, the smaller the probability of one vote affecting the result, the greater the number of people who will potentially be affected by it, so these factors can balance out even in very large elections. (You may argue that there are higher-impact ways to be altruistic, which is probably true but doesn’t necessarily matter; usually the choice isn’t “vote xor make an effective donation”, it’s simply “vote xor don’t bother voting”.)
(I know you went on to talk about the possibility of voting as “a charitable or recreational activity”, and I know the main point was to describe why people won’t bother becoming informed voters. But I still think it’s worth pointing out that your opening claim is far from obviously true.)
Its quite simple. Voting is irrational. The probability that your vote is pivotal is about inversely proportionate to the voting population size.
That means any expected reward you get from voting is small. Even in a school board election there are often thousands of participants.
When people start voting for non selfish reasons they’re only going to devote a small amount of time to essentially a charitable or recreational activity. They’re not going to get informed. They’re not going to make a deep dive.
This depends on a couple of assumptions:
The cost of voting is greater than the benefit you receive, including whatever good feelings you get from doing your duty, supporting the good guys, etc.
The cost still outweighs the benefit even after taking into account the total expected benefit to other people, multiplied by however much you care about this.
For someone who feels good about voting, it can be a rational thing to do even if the probability of affecting the result is negligible or zero. And for someone who finds voting annoying but cares a significant amount about others who will be affected by the result, it’s entirely possible for voting to be rational. Generally, the smaller the probability of one vote affecting the result, the greater the number of people who will potentially be affected by it, so these factors can balance out even in very large elections. (You may argue that there are higher-impact ways to be altruistic, which is probably true but doesn’t necessarily matter; usually the choice isn’t “vote xor make an effective donation”, it’s simply “vote xor don’t bother voting”.)
(I know you went on to talk about the possibility of voting as “a charitable or recreational activity”, and I know the main point was to describe why people won’t bother becoming informed voters. But I still think it’s worth pointing out that your opening claim is far from obviously true.)