I read an article for a philosophy class last year arguing that bad voters (defined as those who are ignorant, immoral, or irrational), have a moral obligation to not vote. The author casts his case in a duty to "not engage in collectively harmful activities when the cost of restraint is low" (10). That is, if you could drive 2 minutes down the road to a dump, you have a moral obligation to put your trash there rather than in the river behind your house. "We should pollute less because pollution harms us all, but I should pollute less because, all things equal, it is unfair for me to benefit from polluting as I please" (12).
I think that this moral duty is fairly simple and one that we should all be on board with. I think that it is not obvious that the moral duty applies to voting, but that is a philosophical issue, not an economic one.
What makes this argument interesting to the economist is the idea that if voting poorly really is like polluting the polls, then maybe we should apply the economist's toolkit on pollution rather than the moralist's (after all, how many people have stopped polluting because a philosopher told them it was bad?).
The economist would begin—after retching and cringing and crying at the claim that individuals should try to be slightly less self-interested and more moral creatures—with the inference that if bad voting is like pollution, then we should be treating it like an externality. The justification for this is elaborated in the philosophical article as well as the Johnson article we read recently. The social marginal cost of bad voting is far higher than the private marginal cost. Or, framed another way, the social marginal benefit of good voting is far higher than the private marginal benefit. The solution might be a tax-break or subsidy given to people who show up to the polls and pass a certain "political awareness/rationality" test. Alternatively, we could have an idiot-tax on those who try to cast votes and fail a "political awareness/rationality" test. Either solution, as well as any other I've thought of, sounds dangerous to democracy.
1 comment:
I am not sure I agree about your description of the economists inference from the ‘bad voting as pollution’ point. You say that the economist would push to incentivize knowledgeable votes or disincentivize uneducated votes through corrective taxation. I am just not sure I can see bad voting as an externality. The Johnson reading describes Rational Ignorance as a distortion on the decision making process of democracy. Thus, the more ignorance there is, the larger the distortion, the less likely democracy creates the Qae outcome. When the economist recognizes the ‘pollution’ of bad voting doesn’t he say the distortion is too high and we must rely on the market instead? Why would he push for incentivize certain people to vote?
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