And if someone better steps up to the plate, I'll be first in line to cast my ballot," he says. Young people often fall into this category, says Huddy, because they "follow news less closely and are more likely than older Americans to get their news from social media.
They do not feel especially well-informed about political candidates and think that the act of voting is more difficult than do older Americans.
When measuring someone's propensity to vote, it "matters whether a person is interested in politics or sees politics as something central to their sense of self," he says. There are "lots of things we can care more or less about: music, baseball, abstract art, and so on," Federico says. Others do not. All other things being equal, people who are less interested in politics — or who do not see their political beliefs as central to their identity — are less likely to vote.
Extroverts and people who are more open to new experiences are more likely to vote, Federico says, and conversely, people who are "relatively close-minded and don't like new things" and those "who are less outgoing and assertive" are less likely to vote.
While there can be a lot that goes into a person's decision to vote or not, the fact that millions of people vote at all is a wonder, says Jay Van Bavel, an associate professor in New York University's Department of Psychology , whose research focuses on things like moral values and political beliefs affect the brain and behavior.
Economists have argued that voting is irrational because one vote almost never swings an election," Van Bavel says. The collective willingness to participate in democracy is on some level, an act of selflessness, he says. Don't miss: Chase Sapphire Preferred is offering a massive 80,point bonus for a limited time. Skip Navigation. Jennifer Liu. This can be considered "principled abstention," says Federico. In the presence of three or more alternatives candidates or issues , all voting methods violate at least one of a few basic technical or democratic-fairness criteria.
One is monotonicity , which means that if one voter changes his mind in favor of an alternative, other things being equal, the social choice aggregation function should produce a result that does not increase the chances of another alternative. Undifferentiatedness or anonymity means that votes cannot be distinguished from one another: all voters are equal and anonymous.
Neutrality requires that the voting system not favor one alternative over others. For example, if a primary is held to winnow a larger field to two, that would violate the neutrality criterion. We must also consider the fundamental Condorcet criterion named after 18th century French mathematician and philosopher Nicolas de Condorcet , which requires that the winner among many alternatives opponents or proposals be the one that would also win a pair-wise election against each of the other candidates.
Problem is, a "Condorcet winner" does not always — or even often — exist when more than two alternatives are being voted on. And when a Condorcet winner does exist, it may not actually be chosen because of the voting system. For instance, in the presidential election, Progressive Party candidate Theodore Roosevelt may have been a Condorcet winner against Democrat Woodrow Wilson and Republican William Taft, but Wilson won the election.
Social choice, Riker concludes, depends as much on aggregation methods and political institutions as it does on individual values and tastes. Since each voting method can be justified by one or more democratic criteria methods that look fairer, for example, may ignore the Condorcet winner , we must face the fact that an election has no "true" winner. The "paradox of voting," discovered by Condorcet in the 18th century, lies in the observation that a Condorcet winner may not exist, leaving unstable cycles between alternatives.
Table 1, reproduced from Riker, gives the ordinal preferences of each voter. Note that, like elsewhere in this review, we are considering ordinal preferences — that is, the ranks that each voter assigns to alternatives — without any assumption about the intensity of the preferences of each nor any common metric to compare the voters' preference scales. If the voters are asked to choose between X and Y , V1 and V3 would vote for X because it is higher in their respective preferences; the social choice would thus be X.
If our three voters are asked instead or later to choose between Y and Z , the result of the vote would be Y because V1 and V2 would vote for Y ; the social choice would be Y.
Now, if our three voters are asked to choose between Z and X , the majority, V2 and V3 , would vote for Z ; the social choice would be Z. So, we have social choices indicating that, "for society" if we may talk this way , X is preferred to Y , Y to Z , but Z to X. Despite all voters having transitive individual preferences, the social choice function reveals intransitive preferences.
The "social choice function" is the mechanism or procedure that translates individual preferences into social choices. This function is also called the "social welfare function" because, in welfare economics, a similar device was used to supposedly maximize social welfare. In a democracy, it is assumed that some method of voting constitutes the social choice function, either in elections, referenda, or plebiscites.
Moreover, different mechanisms for making social choices and for voting exist. This is where Arrow's work becomes crucial. He mathematically demonstrated that something similar to the voting paradox affects all sorts of social choices with more than two alternatives. The original demonstration appears in his book Social Choice and Individual Values.
In simplified terms, Arrow's Impossibility Theorem states that no method of aggregation the social choice function can satisfy all of the following conditions:.
Assuming that Conditions are realized, Arrow's theorem implies that any social choice will be either dictatorial violating Condition 4 or incoherent violating the axiom of collective rationality. Social choices are either dictatorial or, as Riker puts it, "arbitrary nonsense. One way to escape incoherence in social choice is to assume that the preferences of all individuals are "single-peaked" — a limitation of individual preferences that violates Condition 2.
Single-peakedness means that if we place each individual's preferences for the different alternatives on an axis imagine that these alternatives are different tax rates , each individual has only one utility peak: as he moves away from his ideal alternative, in one direction or another more taxes or less , other alternatives become less and less attractive.
To simplify a bit too much : under single-peakedness, no individual prefers what others consider extremes: in the Vietnam War, for example, an individual's two most preferred alternatives cannot be to get out immediately or to carpet-bomb the country. Although voters have different opinions, they share a common attitude on what is reasonable.
Assuming single-peakedness saves the coherence of social choices, but at a cost. In an election, candidates will be motivated to move to the center of the political spectrum in order to gather the largest number of votes. As they move there, they gain more votes from the other side of the median than they lose from the side they are on. This "median voter theorem" means that only the median voter or group of voters , who is exactly in the middle of the distribution of political preferences, will see his top-preferred alternative translated into a social choice.
Political parties become difficult to distinguish because they all want to please the median voter. If there are no more incoherent cycles, that is because, in practice, all the alternatives have been arbitrarily reduced to a single one at the middle of the political spectrum.
In a large, diversified society, of course, single-peakedness is unrealistic. And as soon as many genuine alternatives are available to voters, incoherent social choices will raise their heads. The dilemma between nonsense and dictatorship is not very attractive. Much of the research in social choice theory after Arrow's theorem has been to try to salvage a transitive social choice function, often by weakening Condition 3 on the independence of irrelevant alternatives. This and other solutions, however, end up violating Arrow's conditions.
As noted by Riker, another escape was proposed by James Buchanan, the Nobel economics laureate — an escape that negates the whole concept of a social choice function. Buchanan pointed out that it is anthropomorphism to expect that a group or a society, which is not an actual living and thinking creature, will show the same logical coherence as an individual.
The search for a meaningful social choice function is thus necessarily a vain enterprise. For Buchanan, it is anyway preferable to have succeeding cycles of temporary domination by different majorities rather than a continuous exploitation of minorities by a stable majority. The advantage of market choices is precisely that they are individual choices and do not aim at imposing a social — that is, political — choice on everybody. It makes no sense to say that the number of chocolate bars bought by individual consumers is incoherent with the quantity of beer they drink.
On the market, every individual gets what he wants within his budget constraint ; not so in politics. From there ultimately comes the incoherence or dictatorship of social choices. One sort of manipulation is strategic voting — that is, voting against one's preferences in order to avoid a still worse outcome. This is common in Congress through vote trading, which according to Riker is "the most extreme version of strategic voting": I will vote for your pet project, which I don't like much or am indifferent about, in exchange for you voting for my pet project, which I absolutely want.
This sort of horse trading can even lead to a set of decisions that is detrimental to everybody. In general elections, major political parties try to crush out third parties by telling the latters' potential voters to vote strategically in order not to "waste" their votes. Strategic voting can also happen under proportional representation because voters may give their votes to a party more likely to participate in a governing coalition. However, as Riker admits, strategic voting is unlikely I would say very unlikely in all but small groups.
In large elections, an individual voter has no practical influence on the result, which must be obvious to him if he does not suffer from cognitive limitations or is not a victim of propaganda.
If this individual does not vote, the winner is extremely unlikely to be different because winners are not elected by a single pivotal vote. Another legal method of voting manipulation is the control of the agenda by politicians or bureaucrats — that is, the process whereby voters are presented with only some alternatives or in an order favorable to the manipulator.
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