Low voter turnout is a bad thing. Let's get that out of the way immediately.
The midterm elections take place on Tuesday, but it's highly likely that relatively few Americans will actually go to the polls. In 2010, in the last midterm election, only 37 percent of the voting-age population voted.
What's more, voter turnout isn't evenly dispersed: Hispanics and lower-income people are less likely to vote, for example, a disturbing sign of disenfranchisement. And even if low turnout were uniformly spread among economic and racial groups, it would still be disheartening. It runs counter to our fundamental democratic ideal of universal governance by an active electorate. As a matter of principle, we would want everyone to vote, and to do so in an informed and reasoned way.
But one type of nonvoter provides a silver lining in this otherwise gloomy state of affairs. These people, whom I call sporadic voters, don't apathetically sit out all elections. They fail to go to the polls sometimes but do go at other times, presumably when they perceive the stakes to be high. And unlike apathetic nonvoters who undermine democracy, sporadic voters may actually bolster it. In fact, recent behavioral research suggests that this group may provide a reservoir of neutrality that can help keep democracy from going astray.
To understand this research, it's worth reviewing the textbook economic model of why people might not vote. To economists, voting is a classic example of a free-rider problem. Getting to the voting booth requires time and energy, but statistically each vote matters only a little, so many people who value democracy count on others to carry the load for them.
Two economists - Casey Mulligan at the University of Chicago and Chip Hunter, now at Charles River Associates - calculate the odds that a single vote influences a congressional election outcome to be roughly one in 89,000. But even if one vote doesn't matter much, all votes together obviously do. As a result, voting is a collective good: We want others to vote even if we don't.
Such nonvoting behavior, of course, has negative consequences. But there is another way of looking at it. Rather than focusing on what drives people to vote, consider how voting drives people.
Imagine that someone asks you to place a large 'Drive Carefully' sign on your lawn. Even if you agree with the sentiment, you may not want the sign on your lawn, so you say no. Imagine, however, that instead of being asked to put up a sign, you are asked to add your name to a petition for the same cause. It's less of a commitment, and you may well say yes: It's no surprise that small requests elicit more positive responses.
But small requests also grease the wheels for bigger ones, as the psychologists Jonathan Freedman and Scott Fraser found in a 1966 paper. They discovered that people are much more likely to acquiesce to a relatively large request if they've already been primed by a small one. That is because our preferences aren't fixed. What might have seemed unreasonable can suddenly seem doable after we've acquiesced to a lesser demand.
Ebonya Washington, an economist at Yale, and I tested whether the voting process changes our preferences in this way. The very act of voting for a given candidate or party ties us mentally to that candidate and inadvertently costs us some measure of our neutrality. We may now be more likely to accept our preferred candidate's failures while nit-picking the faults of an opponent. Psychologists sometimes call this cognitive dissonance: We don't just choose what we like; we like more and more what we choose. Voting - doing it and thinking about it - can polarize us.
To test this idea, we compared the polarization of 19- and 20-year-olds in an election year. Both age groups were eligible to vote, but only the 20-year-olds were able to vote in the previous election - and thus had a chance to formally commit themselves to candidates and ideologies.
We found that the 20-year-olds held stronger and more uniform views than the 19-year-olds. That wasn't just a result of aging: When we looked at more age groups, we found that 18- and 19-year-olds, both of whom were ineligible to vote in the previous election, were similarly polarized; there were also no polarization differences between 20- and 21-year-olds, both of whom were able to vote previously. This and other evidence led us to conclude that exposure to the voting process more effectively committed people to a candidate or party.
Another study, by Professor Washington and by Alan Gerber and Gregory Huber, both political scientists at Yale, showed that party registration had a similar effect. In their experiment, they reminded a group of unaffiliated voters in Connecticut that they would need to register with a party in order to vote in an upcoming primary. This reminder increased party registration, as well as subsequent partisanship. Between a primary and a general election, people may change their views. But compared with a control group of unaffiliated voters who were not prompted to register with a party, those who had received the reminder were more likely to stick to their initial political orientation.
This, then, may be the hidden cost of voting, at least in American elections in this era: We find ourselves locked into one partisan policy or candidate. We process new information in a biased way. We cement a position and escalate our commitments. In essence, we become less neutral.
The key to short-circuiting this process may be that outsiders - those who haven't agreed to any of the small steps - view the whole thing differently. They see the question about putting up the yard sign for what it is: a big and unreasonably intrusive request. They don't feel compelled to say yes because of their own past behavior. By showing up in the middle of a process of escalation, they may help to prevent it.
A combination of neutrality and persistent voting would be ideal. But our psychologies are complicated. If they override our narrow self-interest and lead us to vote instead of free-riding, the very act of voting may make us more partisan. Sporadic voters can provide an antidote: Their previous lack of engagement may serve as a counter to partisanship.
There is a line between apathy and neutrality. People who sit out all elections provide little value to a democracy. People who sit out some elections, jumping in at crucial times, serve an important role as a reserve army of the uncommitted.
Posted by Unknown on Saturday, November 1, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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