Venezuela and its 1.6% margin

With elections coming up in the US, within my family, the recent conversations tend to revolve in reminiscing the times when Venezuelans were motivated and confident to vote in elections.     

The last major election in which Venezuelans thought it was irrational not to vote was in 2013 when the opposition leader, Henrique Capriles, lost to current president, Nicolas Maduro, by 1.6% … yes you read that correctly, 1.6%!!! Venezuelans were outraged and demanded a recount because for the first time in years the opposition felt that their individual votes actually had the potential to affect the presidential outcome. 

Prior to the 2013 election, there were various events in the previous years that had raised the cost of voting tremendously; social pressure to vote for Chavez/Maduro was effectively applied. Back in 2004 for example, there was a referendum to determine whether or not Chavez (Venezuela’s president at the time) should be recalled from office. Turns out that through simple majority rule, it was concluded that the majority of the population approved of Chavez and wanted to keep him as president. There was suspicion of fraud from the opposition who demanded a recount of votes, and in return the government publicly published a list of those individuals who had voted against Chavez. The list affected workers of PDVSA, Venezuela’s state owned oil and natural gas company, who were fired on the spot as a result of their name being on the list. From the government’s perspective, embedding such consequences in voting would mean that people could either abstain from voting because they did not want to face radical repercussions, or vote for the “correct” candidate ( in this case the socialist party).

This of course meant very high costs to voting in the following years, because revealing true preferences of presidential candidates could cost someone their current and future employment. However, in 2013 Venezuelans saw that the expected marginal benefit of voting also included other factors such as civic duty, expressive utility and above all the inherit utility of voting which could outweigh the marginal costs of voting. Individuals were publicly expressing their candidate preference regardless of the consequences, because in that moment, the marginal cost of voting was almost zero and the probability of a vote being a swing vote seemed too high. With the referendum in 2004, I would have imagined that the event would have discouraged Venezuelans of voting in future election, but surprisingly enough it did the opposite for the 2013 elections. Now time will tell when once again the expected marginal benefits will be far greater than its marginal costs.