The utility of voting

Paul Campos asks if there is any utilitarian case for voting. The context is a discussion in blog-land about whether single-issue voters (or ‘pox on both house’ voters) are being irresponsible for refusing engage in cost-benefit analysis about which candidate is better overall.

So: I think the easiest answer to Campos’ question is simply to deny that you NEED a utiliarian basis for voting. Casting a ballot, I think, is a matter of civic responsibility. Your goal shouldn’t simply be personal interest-maximization. However, I don’t expect the whole world to join me in that judgment, so here’s two quick reasons why utilitarianism shouldn’t lead you to consider voting completely meaningless.

First, the consequences are large enough that even a miniscule risk of tipping an election is probably still worth the very minimal effort it takes to vote. This is particularly true for people voting in elections expected to be somewhat close. My vote for Obama in November has (for all reasonable purposes) a 0% chance of making a difference. So it’s hard to make it count by this standard. But anyone living in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Wisconsin, etc. has a non-zero chance of actually mattering. And if you think the difference in value provided by one presidential candidate over the other is even a modest gain, then spread that value out over hundreds of millions (even billions since we’re the global hegemon) of people. It adds up quickly. Let’s say you have a one in a million chance of tipping an election. Well, if your preferred candidate will provide one additional dollar of utility per citizen, then the payoff for your tipping-vote is 300 million bucks. Sounds like a good investment to me.

Of course, there are two problems with that argument. One I already mentioned: it only applies to those people who realistically can cast a vote with even a one-in-a-billion chance of making a difference. Which is a surprisingly small number of people. And second, it assumes that you want to measure utility at the social level. But if you’re purely self-interested, you might ignore those benefits. So the math gets a lot tougher.

So my second utilitarian argument for voting focuses on rule-utilitarianism. Basically: the rule of voting produces significant good compared to the rule of ‘some people vote and others free-ride.’ Even if this isn’t formalized with an actual law, the normative principle works, that one should vote because it conforms to the rule that best maximizes social utility.

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