- Caplan, Bryan.
The Myth of the Rational Voter.
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.
ISBN 978-0-691-13873-2.
-
Every survey of the electorate in Western democracies shows it
to be woefully uninformed: few can name their elected representatives or
identify their party affiliation, nor answer the most basic questions
about the political system under which they live. Economists and
political scientists attribute this to “rational ignorance”:
since there is a vanishingly small probability that the vote
of a single person will be decisive, it is rational for that
individual to ignore the complexities of the issues and candidates
and embrace the cluelessness which these polls make manifest.
But, the experts contend, there's no problem—even if a
large majority of the electorate is ignorant knuckle-walkers,
it doesn't matter because they'll essentially vote at random.
Their uninformed choices will cancel out, and the small informed
minority will be decisive. Hence the “miracle of
aggregation”: stir in millions of ignoramuses and thousands of
political junkies and diligent citizens and out pops true wisdom.
Or maybe not—this book looks beyond the miracle of aggregation,
which assumes that the errors of the uninformed are random, to
examine whether there are systematic errors (or biases)
among the general population which cause democracies to choose
policies which are ultimately detrimental to the well-being of the
electorate. The author identifies four specific biases in the
field of economics, and documents, by a detailed analysis of the
Survey
of Americans and Economists on the Economy , that while
economists, reputed to always disagree amongst themselves, are
in fact, on issues which Thomas Sowell terms
Basic Economics (September 2008),
almost unanimous in their opinions, yet widely at variance from
the views of the general public and the representatives they elect.
Many economists assume that the electorate votes what economists
call its
“rational choice”,
yet empirical data presented here shows that democratic electorates
behave very differently. The key insight is that choice in an
election is not a preference in a market, where the choice directly
affects the purchaser, but rather an allocation in a commons, where
the consequences of an individual vote have negligible results
upon the voter who casts it. And we all know how commons
inevitably end.
The individual voter in a large democratic polity bears a
vanishingly small cost in voting their ideology or
beliefs, even if they are ultimately damaging to their own well-being,
because the probability their own single vote will
decide the election is infinitesimal. As a result, the
voter is liberated to vote based upon totally irrational
beliefs, based upon biases shared by a large portion of the
electorate, insulated by the thought, “At least my vote
won't decide the election, and I can feel good for having
cast it this way”.
You might think that voters would be restrained from indulging
their feel-good inclinations by considering their self interest,
but studies of voter behaviour and the preferences of subgroups
of voters demonstrate that in most circumstances voters
support policies and candidates they believe are best for the
polity as a whole, not their narrow self interest. Now, this
would be a good thing if their beliefs were correct, but
at least in the field of economics, they aren't,
as defined by the near-unanimous consensus of professional
economists. This means that there is a large, consistent,
systematic bias in policies preferred by the uninformed electorate,
whose numbers dwarf the small fraction who comprehend the issues
in contention. And since, once again, there is no cost to an
individual voter in expressing his or her erroneous beliefs,
the voter can be “rationally irrational”: the possibility of
one vote being decisive vanishes next to the cost of becoming informed
on the issues, so it is rational to unknowingly vote irrationally.
The reason democracies so often pursue irrational policies such
as protectionism is not unresponsive politicians or influence of
special interests, but instead politicians giving the
electorate what it votes for, which is regrettably ultimately
detrimental to its own self-interest.
Although the discussion here is largely confined to economic issues, there is
no reason to believe that this inherent failure of democratic
governance is confined to that arena. Indeed, one need only peruse
the daily news to see abundant evidence of democracies committing
folly with the broad approbation of their citizenry. (Run off a
cliff? Yes, we can!)
The author contends
that rational irrationality among the electorate is an argument for
restricting the scope of government and devolving responsibilities it
presently undertakes to market mechanisms. In doing so, the citizen
becomes a consumer in a competitive market and now has an individual
incentive to make an informed choice because the consequences of
that choice will be felt directly by the person making it. Naturally,
as you'd expect with an irrational electorate, things seem to have been
going in precisely the opposite direction for much of the last century.
This is an excellently argued and exhaustively documented book
(The ratio of pages of source citations and end notes to main text may
be as great as anything I've read) which will make you look at democracy
in a different way and begin to comprehend that in many cases where
politicians do stupid things, they are simply carrying out the will of
an irrational electorate. For a different perspective on the shortcomings
of democracy, also with a primary focus on economics, see Hans-Hermann
Hoppe's superb
Democracy: The God that Failed
(June 2002), which approaches the topic from a hard
libertarian perspective.
June 2009 