Irrational voters

Winston Churchill said that the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. Meaning that the vast majority of voters are intolerably ignorant (or, even worse, directly irrational) and that this is a serious disease, for those who appeal to be democrats.

Are we voters as unreliable as Churchill suggests? Since the second half of the 20th century, several social scientists have tried to provide an answer to this question, and so far the results are not encouraging. In the words of Philip Converse "the two simplest truths I know about the distribution of political information in modern electorates are that the average is low and the variance is high".

It always happens that many citizens do not know how to identify any of the candidates for Congress in their constituencies. Or they don't know which party has a majority in Congress. Or they systematically underestimate the share of the national budget devoted to foreign aid. According to Michael X's book What Americans Know About Politics and Why It Matters, the following is stated:

All this would seem to confirm the less harsh interpretation of Churchill's quotation, which merely states that we voters are generally quite ignorant. After all, what are the chances that our vote will be decisive in an election? Practically nil. If the main reason you are going to vote is because you want to contribute to implementing a particular policy (or set of policies), then you have chosen the least efficient means. Not only because their benefits (measured in terms of the probability of being decisive) are negligible, but also because the costs are often high. One must make an effort to vote. At the very least, you have to go to your polling station. Is this expensive? Partly, yes. Every time I spend doing X is a time I can't devote to Y. Okay, but still, isn't that a ridiculous cost? Well, it depends. According to some estimates,the probability of dying in a traffic accident on the way to the polling station is similar to the probability of having an impact on the outcome of that election.

In this way, it may seem like a very high cost. But the costs increase even more if we assume that it is not enough that I am going to vote, but that I must also have taken some time to reflect on my vote. In other words, it is not enough for me to show up on Election Day and drop the ballot into the ballot box. To be a responsible voter, I must have been properly informed. And this does seem expensive in a non-trivial sense. Getting properly informed about a choice is not an easy task: it takes time and effort, sacrificing many Ys for an X over which you probably won't have much influence after all. For someone who believes that we should act with the aim of maximizing the satisfaction of our preferences (i.e., that we should always use the most effective means for our purposes), it may be rational to be politically ignorant. This is what is known as the thesis of rational ignorance. Since the chances of my vote being decisive are so slim, and the opportunity costs (everything I give up) so high, I have no incentive to inform myself - unless, of course, I have other reasons for informing myself.

However, not all authors are willing to stand in rational ignorance. For example, for economist Bryan Caplan, the explanatory potential of this theory is important, but also limited. In some cases, says Caplan, we have no choice but to conclude that voters are simply irrational. But irrational rationals. What does this mean? To understand this idea, it is useful to distinguish between epistemically irrational beliefs and instrumentally irrational beliefs. An epistemically irrational belief is one that we hold despite the fact that there are decisive reasons against it. On the contrary, an instrumentally irrational belief is simply one that does not lead to the satisfaction of our preferences. Suppose I think I live in a fantasy world. This belief is clearly irrational from an epistemic point of view, because it is completely unjustified. But it is also so instrumentally, because it will hardly lead me to the satisfaction of my preferences. If I cross the street without looking because I think I'm in a meadow from my favorite adventure novel, reality - or, rather, the front of a truck - will soon make me pay the price for my epistemic irrationality. But there are cases in which both types of irrationality may not coincide. Imagine the case of a child who is beginning to doubt the existence of the tooth fairy, a belief that has traditionally made him feel good, something he values greatly. If, in the face of his crisis of faith, the child decided to maintain his belief in the existence of the tooth fairy, this belief would obviously be epistemically irrational. But it is less obvious that this is also the case from an instrumental point of view: after all, the benefits of maintaining it are high and its costs are very low. So this could be an example of something epistemically irrational but not instrumentally.

For Caplan, this is precisely what happens to many of us voters: since the material cost of our individual irrationality (what we would lose if our irrational belief were victorious after discounting the improbability of being decisive) is very low, it turns out to be (instrumentally) rational (epistemically) irrational.

The truth is that examples of irrationality in politics - regardless of whether or not Caplan's explanation is valid - seem to be abundant. For example, the phenomenon of motivated reasoning, in which our beliefs are modified to fit in with what makes us feel good, and not the other way around. For example, in one experiment, participants were shown images of celebrities who had committed an action apparently contrary to the ideals they claimed to hold. The latter is important because it allowed celebrities to be divided into conservatives and liberals. What the results of the experiment suggested was that the Conservatives tended to be much more sympathetic to the apparent inconsistencies of their co-religionists, while they were much tougher on their ideological rivals. And the reverse was also true: Liberals labeled conservatives as hypocrites while tending to exonerate others.

And as I mentioned earlier, Churchill's dictum would be valid even in its harshest version: we are not only the majority of highly ignorant voters, but we also behave quite irrationally. A celebrated ideal of democracy compares it to a forum where citizens participate in a serene and informed debate. But perhaps in our non-ideal conditions the most appropriate analogy is perhaps that of the football stadium, and we, a group of hooligans.