Some Nuance on “Bad Voters”

by Will Wilkinson on October 6, 2008

I’d like to emphasize that my crazy gloss on Jason Brennan’s fastidiously logical academic paper is my crazy gloss. Please do read the paper [rtf], which I think is outstanding.

Let me weigh in on a few objections that have come up in the comments. First, the general thrust of the argument is just to show that civic-mindedness need not require political involvement. Indeed, Jason gives what I find to be a powerful argument to the effect that civic-mindedness sometimes requires not participating in politics. That’s what I take to be the point of the paper. If you can show that voting is sometimes morally wrong, then you’ve got a killer argument that it cannot be morally mandatory.

Now, Jason certainly has no interest in keeping people who want to vote from voting, and neither do I. He’s just pointing out that there are conditions under which it would be wrong for a civic-minded person to do so. (We’re both libertarians, very comfortable with the idea that people should be free to do things they ought not do.) If you accept some reasonable assumptions about the aim of democracy, and accept standard reasoning about moral duties regarding collective action problems, then you probably should accept Jason’s conclusion

If you were to watch our diavlog, you’d find that the we cover the paradoxical elements of the argument. Many of the people most likely to be vote badly–out of ignorance, prejudice, groupthink, etc.–may well be least likely to judge that they will judge badly, while those most worried about their own biases, and most likely to be moved by an argument like Jason’s, are probably least likely to vote badly.

So what’s the practical upshot of the argument? I take the upshot to be that widespread conceptions of civic engagement that fixate on political participation in general, and voting in particular, should not so blithely be given the moral high ground in popular discourse. We should not make poorly-informed people feel embarrassed or ashamed at not voting, or pressure them into it. Indeed, if Jason is right, they should take some pride in not voting, and we ought to congratulate many people for staying away from the polls.

I concluded my post with a potential explanation of why this change in norms will not in fact happen. I argued that the Democratic party in particular would have a lot to lose, since the least-educated lean Democratic, while the media and the intellectual class also overwhelming favors the Democrats. The cognitive elite who dominate media and academia are part of an active coalition with the least educated, and they need them to turn out if they’re going to get into power and stay there. If you don’t think it is true that the least educated Americans are much more likely than average to vote Democratic than Republican, and that journalists and academics are overwhelmingly more likely to vote for Democrats, then I would like to introduce you to something called Google. I don’t bring this up in a completely bizarre and pointless attempt at suppressing the votes of people with a high school education or less. I bring it up to explain why, in the present climate, the idea that it is not the civic duty of absolutely everyone to vote is totally doomed. I would like to think that the dispassionate discussion of democratic politics is possible.

But for those of you who are convinced that American democratic politics is a momentous battle of good versus evil, and that anything said about politics must reflect some kind of coalitional motive, let me point out that I have often aired my preference for Obama over McCain, though I will probably vote for Bob Barr.

Viewing 12 Comments

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    Thanks for the additional post, Will. And thanks for taking the time to hold the discussion in the first place.

    You're right about my motives, here, too. This particular paper is going to seem mean and elitist to lots of people (even if it officially takes no position at all on how extensive bad voting is or on which demographic groups tend to vote badly). Yet it's a piece of an underlying project the goal of which is to recognize the contributions to the common good made by everyday citizens as opposed to holding only community organizers, soldiers, and politicians count as exemplary citizens.
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    So maybe the paper addresses this but what should someone do if they find themselves feeling as if they aren't prepared to vote well but that nonetheless they are more prepared than a majority of other voters. Given that the vast majority of people will never stop voting for these reasons does it make sense to continue voting as long as you feel you're in the top half of the electorate?
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    From a quasi-Aristotelian perspective, could one not object that good voting, whatever that might mean, requires some sustained engagement with the act of voting? Surgeons, after all, do not develop the skills that make them good surgeons simply by doing well in medical school; indeed, they cannot become competent surgeons without years of training after medical school. One could try to make the argument that all good voters must at some point vote badly (perhaps many times), in order to become good voters--and that there is thus little reason to congratulate someone for not voting, if one values good voting.

    Perhaps voting is not like being a surgeon. But what is it? And in what sense does this type of action not benefit from practice?
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    Tiberius,
    Wouldn't one think that the practice isn't the act of voting itself, but something like, for example, reading newspapers or discussing politics or general education or something along those lines?
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    But what if Hanson is right? What if voting and politics have absolutely nothing to do with policy? Why then does it matter who votes? Are there still "bad" voters?
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    Hanson merely claims that much political behaviour is *motivated* by reasons other than the effect on policy. It still has an effect on policy.
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    On Hanson: If voters vote for candidates likely to enact harmful policies because of their desire to signal to others, then they vote badly. Perhaps voters don't care at all about policies. But that doesn't mean they aren't bad voters. Quite the contrary--that's one of the things that makes them bad.
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    Ok, perhaps voters don't care at all about policies, Jason. Let me think about that.

    If all voters are thus "bad," and Hansonian signaling is inherent in democracy, then there will never be any "good" voters, will there? Or at least there will never be enough. And therefore aren't you, Jason, basically castigating sparrows for being unable to do calculus?

    If useful or meaningful democracy is thus impossible, why bother to defend universal suffrage at all? Why not just call it empty, expensive theater and abandon it?

    So you would in fact be better off holding a salon in your living room,scrapbooking, joining the bowling league, or drinking wine in your garden while Rome burns in the distance, yes?
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    Webgrrl, why would you assume that signaling is binary (you signal or you don't) or that signaling is uniformly distributed (we all do it the same)?

    The available evidence is that some portion of our political views must consist of signaling, but surely some of us have a higher mix of in-group/out-group signaling in our political beliefs. Furthermore, signaling behavior is likely to incrementally distort astute policy preferences, not eliminate them entirely.

    If we can get those individuals to stay home. We should have less signaling-related inputs in our political process in the aggregate.

    Imagine a world where giving medical advice was considered both a natural right and public virtue. Wouldn't you say that encouraging people without medical training (or emotional preferences for, say, faith-healing) to influence the healthcare decisions of others is likely, on balance, to result in more bad decisions about health? Would a policy of "if you don't know what that lump is, don't feel obligated to speculate" improve or impair the quality of medical discourse?
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    The problem is the positive feedback loop. The more the Democrats convince ill-informed people to vote, the greater the collective power of such voters in every subsequent election. Encourage the ill-informed to vote. Expand government power. Increase the significance of the elections. Repeat.
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    Yes, the problem has been the positive feedback loop. The more the Republicans convince the biased, bigoted, ill-informed, religious zealots (who make the 'id' of the Republican party) to vote, the greater the collective power of such voters in subsequent election to elect a incompetent candidate based on religious views (example: G.W. Bush). Encourage the bigots to vote. Expand government incompetence and corruption. Increase the significance of the elections. Repeat.
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    I had thought that the empirics were that education and performance on basic political tests don't have much of a predictive power (at least in a linear fashion) with political party, though they do have a lot of predictive power, just orthogonal to the right-left dimension. That is, adding extra education or political information changes preferences, but not systematically in favor of one party. Which seems to be entirely in keeping with what Brennan is saying (though not in keeping with some of the less sympathetic readings of what Brennan or Wilkinson are saying), unless I'm misinterpreting.
 

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