Gay Marriage Amendments and Voting Models

Throughout this fall’s election season, I’ve found the role of gay marriage in the election extremely interesting. On Election Day, 11 states, including key swing states like Ohio, Michigan, and Oregon, voted on state constitutional amendments to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman. All eleven amendments passed, most with fairly large margins. Most of the media attention to this issue has been devoted to how these ballot questions increased turnout of conservative voters and, as such, may have led to President Bush’s victory (http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,137319,00.html, http://www.keepmedia.com/ShowItemDetails.do?ema_id=84095&item_id=640397&oliID=176), but what is also interesting for the purposes of public choice is why this particular issue is one that rallies so many voters and arguably greatly increases voter turnout.

While there has been some discussion about just how high voter turnout was, it is generally accepted by analysts and pundits that it was noticeably higher than most previous elections, which means that something about this year’s voting menu made people go out and vote. In a variety of polls, voters have stated that morality and values were major influences on their voting decisions this year, and some have even stated explicitly that they went to the polls to vote on the issue of gay marriage. In thinking about the decisions that these voters made, I found two topics from class discussion applicable and interesting to consider – cost-benefit analysis and minimax regret.

In terms of costs and benefits, it appears that more voters’ personal cost-benefit analyses than in previous years led them to the conclusion that the benefits of voting in this election outweighed the costs. It hasn’t really gotten easier to actually vote since the last election, so the change is most likely to have occurred on the benefit side of the analysis. Due to the admitted role that morals and opposition to gay marriage played in voters’ decisions to vote, it’s pretty easy to look at gay marriage amendments as a major influence on the benefit side of the analysis and therefore a motivator for voter turnout. Voters appear to value the perceived morality of government policies and losing this morality would be extremely detrimental to their utility. It seems that many voters consider gay marriage to undermine their moral positions, so preventing it from occurring would provide them with a tremendous benefit, a benefit that appears to have, for many, outweighed the costs of voting.

As far as minimax regret voting decisions, this issue may have been of such great importance to many voters, most likely because of its perceived moral implications, that they were determined to vote on the matter no matter what the likelihood that they would influence the outcome. In this model, being the one who didn’t vote and then seeing the measure fail would have caused these voters such great regret that they were motivated to vote. In most cases, this would seem like a slightly less reasonable assessment, but due to the importance of morals in this election, it seems more reasonable to apply minimax regret these voting decisions.

Finally, returning to the issue that has received so much media attention – is it problematic that political strategists seem to have added a new tactic to their campaigns and elections repertoire? In the past, the race to the middle and the median voter theory seem to have dominated the strategies of major candidates, but could this new use of provocative ballot questions move us toward a strategy of rigging ballot questions to attract extremists whose voter participation is motivated entirely by one issue?