#48: Why Would Anyone vote?

🗳️Part 1: Fun, duty, other reasons

My home country is holding a big election this Sunday, and I received voting materials in the post a few days ago. I tore up the envelope straight away, feeling grateful to receive the candidates’ pamphlets.

Being the motivation questioner that I now am, I also paused to wonder why people vote.

I choose to sign up to the local voters’ registry and go out to vote on election day. None of it is onerous, but that’s two steps I take willingly. There is no (threat of) sanction if I don’t vote, no direct reward if I do.

Do we maybe seek to connect with something greater than us—a community, an ideology, a nation? Do we vote lest our folks give us a hard time? Do we want to, or have to vote?

“A voté!” · Photo by Arnaud Jaegers on Unsplash

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Duty / Fun

Daniel M. Shea, a professor of government at Colby College in the United States, asks in his 2019 book Why vote? Essential Questions About the Future of Elections in America:

Why would anyone¹ engage in electoral participation in any form? Are there not more interesting and entertaining things to do with your time? Americans are drawn to elections for many reasons, including the belief that the outcome of elections matter, that they are an important tradition, and that they are, yes, entertaining. At the heart of things, Americans believe involvement in elections is part of our civic duty.

Belief and duty, of course, are ingrained in us by school, media outlets, politicians, family, etc. Take Barack Obama’s exhortation to vote in 2018, quoted in Shea’s book:

[T]here is actually only one real check on bad policy and abuse of power. That’s you. You and your vote.

Meanwhile, University of Chicago economist and Freakonomics co-author Steven Levitt dismisses voting as a useless act:

Nobody in their right mind votes because they think they’re going to affect the outcome of an election… The reasons for voting have to be something very different: it’s fun, your wife will love you more if you do it, it makes you feel like a proud American—but never should anyone delude themselves into thinking that the vote they cast will ever decide an election. Just about anything you do with your time would be more productive [than voting].

Several knowledgeable people, like William MacAskill, an associate professor in philosophy at Oxford University², and Andrew Gelman, a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University, disagree with Levitt’s take. But he does have a point that there are a bunch of reasons behind the decision to vote, not all of them rational.

I suppose vote turnout is partly down to how it makes us feel. Do we have faith in the process? Do we feel that we belong in it? Do we enjoy it?

I usually do enjoy poring over the candidates’ proposals (more so than hearing about party squabbles on the radio). I like thinking about which policies and priorities most closely resemble the society I want to live in. I get satisfaction from putting campaign images side by side, contrasting what message each candidate’s team is trying to convey. (Armchair semiotics might not be a common pastime, I’m aware.) Plus, because I’ve been living abroad for years, elections feel like a connection to my country.

All in all, I have intrinsic motivations to vote. It is, dare I say, fun?!³

You’ll need to read the footnotes to make sense of this image. Photo by Bruno Kelzer on Unsplash

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Extrinsic push

Some countries rely on explicit extrinsic motivation to get us to vote: they consider it an obligation, not a mere right. According to the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), 27 out of 203 countries in the world have compulsory voting, including Australia, Belgium (since 1892!), Brazil and Mexico.

But these rules are often symbolic; some countries won’t enforce sanctions, or only mild ones—modest fines rather than prison sentences.

In Australia, compulsory voting fan Lisa Hill, a political scientist at the University of Adelaide, told Vox’s podcast Today, Explained: [I do recommend listening to the whole episode—it is entertaining and informative!]

It's not like we’re these awesome, you know, super people that are better or nicer than everyone else. But the law has created these norms around civic duty and responsibility. It's just like a nudge in the same way that you’re made to wear your seatbelt.

and:

[V]oluntary activity is not the defining feature of democracy, self-government is, the people being sovereign. And the people really can't be sovereign if they're not all there.

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Some advocates of voluntary voting may counter that people who vote against their free will may just check a random box to fulfil their obligation, making the outcome less meaningful. This is how the IDEA website sums up that argument:

Is a government really more legitimate if the high voter turnout is against the will of the voters?

In practice, the effect of compulsory voting seems less pronounced than I expected. The average voter turnout in countries with mandatory voting is only about 7 percentage points higher than in countries with voluntary voting⁴, according to IDEA.

A study published in 2019 compared neighbouring municipalities in the Austrian Alps that had different voting laws. The researchers found that “compulsory voting increased voter turnout by 3.5 percentage points,” but the effect did not persist once compulsory voting was scrapped. They write:

Once the extrinsic motivation for compulsory voting is abolished, voters return to their intrinsic preferences when it comes to participating in elections.

Carinthia, Austria. Photo by Volkan Kaçmaz on Unsplash

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Beyond voting

What happens when we don’t vote? According to Levitt, not much. But Shea writes about the collective price of individual disengagement:

When individuals make the choice to tune out electoral politics, the entire system suffers—which, of course, leads more people to sit on the sidelines.

Hill puts it more bluntly:

[W]e all know that government just directs its attention to voters. So when the poor don't vote, the government just gives tax breaks to the rich and […] certain minorities just can't get out of this vicious cycle of government neglect. Then they feel that the government neglects them, so they don’t want to vote. The more apathetic you get, the less likely you are to vote, and everyone gets themselves into a vicious cycle.

One effect of voting, I realise, is that it gives me a warm glow of low-effort, episodic righteousness. As if ticking a box every now and then made it okay to plunge back into benign apathy the rest of the time.

In fact, voter turnout is not a great predictor of broader political participation. Shea gives the example of the civil rights movement, or LGBTQ activism, which have ushered in big changes, he says, few of them by elected officials:

[O]ne of the main limits of contemporary elections is that voters will too often assume these contests are their only vehicle to bring about change. Our passion for elections curbs other forms of engagement—many of which are more likely to bring about the changes we desire.

Women’s March 2018, New York. Photo by Mirah Curzer on Unsplash

In Part 2, I’ll look into a few other studies on factors that might sway people’s decisions to vote: the weather, social pressure, cash rewards!

1. a man after my own heart

2. in his book Doing Good Better: How Effective Altruism Can Help You Make a Difference.
This is where I originally found Levitt’s quote; I couldn’t find the original source.

3. Fun levels vary immensely, of course. In Chile, back when voting was still compulsory, I remember a sombre atmosphere in the streets of Santiago before and on election day, with a strict curfew and a ban on alcohol sales. But in Australia—where voting is mandatory—election day is apparently one giant party where people eat “democracy sausages” and veggie burgers in their bathing suits.

4. And in the past decades, voter turnout has been decreasing in both groups of countries.