Election Day

I voted this morning. Did you? No? Well then, stop reading this immediately and get out to your polling place.

Really, go on! It's okay, I'll wait.

...impatient finger tapping...

Back? Done? Good. First, you can pat yourself on the back for your remarkable display of civic involvement. Next, you can read some of my ramblings on the subject.

I'm interested in voting not as a democratic phenomenon, but as a psychological one. Voting, as many people will point out, usually as an excuse for not doing it, is a pointless endeavor. One person's vote can't possibly make any difference to the outcome of any given election. This is, of course, true. So if you chose to stay in bed this morning, rather than getting up at some ungodly hour to be at the Shiloh Baptist Church when the polls open, like me, you're being perfectly rational in your self-interest.

But this is only true when seen from the point of view of the individual. From the point of view of society, obviously, voting is a good thing. It's necessary for keeping the democratic system running. The issue comes in how to reconcile these two viewpoints. If everyone were motivated purely by self-interest (which, let's face it, most of us are), then no one would vote. If no one voted, that would mean that the entire democratic system would collapse. But if lots of people do vote, then there's no psychological motivation for any one person to.

This isn't just an issue with voting, by the way. It's fairly common in large societies, and it's known as the "tragedy of the commons." Recycling is another good example. Any given plastic bottle thrown into the trash won't really make a difference in the grand scheme of things, just as one vote won't. But if everyone had that attitude, then we'd be in a major environmental (or governmental) crisis. As usual, The Onion has the best illustration of precisely this point, here.

This sort of situation raises (at least) two interesting questions. The first is why anyone votes at all. The second is how to get people to vote, given that the social and psychological deck is stacked against doing so. I'm sure that there has been lots of interesting research on both of these questions, but I'm equally sure that I haven't read any of it. So you'll have to deal with my uniformed speculation for now.

In order answer either of these questions, I think it would be best to start with trying to figure out why most people don't vote in the first place. One live possibility for this is because they don't see any impact of it. Every person's one measly vote goes into a huge pool, making it impossible so see one's own individual contribution.

Something about this is quite right, of course. It's true that you don't get the sense of having been an agent in making the decision, certainly not in the same way as we're used to having our actions take effect in the world. But this can't be the whole explanation. To see why, look at the difference between the number of people voting in political elections compared to the number of people voting for, say, American Idol. At one point, there were more votes cast in the latter contest than the former (see, e.g., this article in The Guardian), and certainly the totals have been close ever since. Not only that, people get excited about voting for American Idol in way that they don't when talking about ballot initiatives.

Why? On the surface, the structure of each contest is the same. By the end, there are two major candidates, and you cast a vote which goes into a gigantic pool and which, on its own, can't possible affect the outcome. Where's the source of the difference?

One possibility is in the instant gratification. When you vote on American Idol, particularly at the finale, the voters' choices determine the outcome, and you get to hear about it almost right away. So your vote seems like it has much more of an impact on the outcome, giving you more of a feeling of agency, making you more likely to act. But again, this isn't quite right, because the response times for political elections is even more rapid: You can find out the results that same day, instead of waiting a few days or a week. Instant gratification isn't the whole story.

Or is it? I think that this actually is the whole story, or at least closer to it. In an American Idol contest, the winner is crowned and starts churning out albums right away, which you can download from iTunes for a nominal fee and hear blaring from the radio on constant repeat. But when the winner of a Congressional or even Presidential election is declared, it takes a lot longer for that person to start having an effect --- if, indeed, that person has an effect at all. Someone who fights for health care may actually do some things in Washington that trickle down to your average Voting Joe, but someone who fights for campaign reform? Not so much. And even in the case of health care, it's hard to see the causal link between your vote and that person's effectiveness in getting you better coverage or lower premiums. It's certainly much harder to see this link than the one between your American Idol vote and the vapid new Top 40 power ballad.

In the end, then, the problem with these tragedy-of-the-commons cases are that they don't give us enough of a sense of power or agency. They don't engage our psychological understand of actions and reactions in a way that would be useful for making us feel as though voting can really make a difference in the world. And that's the real tragedy --- because they can, and do. So pat yourself on the back again, voter, because in doing so you've not only done your civic duty. You've also shown that you as a person can overcome a simple-minded focus on the here-and-now, and that has (and can and will) make all the difference.