I think that this is a great public forum topic: it relates to a current event that will educate students on some of the nuanc
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Lesson 4.2 Day 3
| 13NFL1-Compulsory Voting Page 127 of 163 www.victorybriefs.com RATIONAL CHOICE ACCORDING TO RATIONAL CHOICE THEORY, VOLUNTARY VOTING IS PREFERABLE TO COMPULSORY VOTING. Krishna and Morgan 12, Vijay Krishna Department of Economics, Penn State University and John Morgan Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, "Voluntary Voting Costs and Benefits, Journal of Economic Theory, May 21, 2012. In situations where informed voters have a common interest in making the right decision, we have shown that mandatory voting requirements and the elimination or suppression of the option to abstain are positively harmful. On informational grounds,voting should be aright rather than a duty. Many situations involve common interests In committee-like settings there are votes by corporate boards of directors witha shared interest in the proÖtability of the company, votes for hiring and promotionin university settings, and votes taken in judiciary bodies such as state or federalsupreme courts. In election settings, there are votes to retain or select judges, votesfor administrative functions such as comptroller or solicitor, and votes on variousballot initiatives such as bond measures.Of course, there are other situations in which the common interests assumptionmay not hold. Inmost elections for legislative o ce, the ideology of the candidates isan important consideration over which voters are unlikely to hold common interests.When ideology plays only a modest role in payo§s, our results are still valid. Evenwhen ideology plays a large role, voluntary voting continues to be best ([14]). Inparticular, the key intuition that di§erential participation provides an importantchannel facilitating information aggregation holds quite generally.Another important consideration outside the scope of the model is the decision byvoters to become informed in the Örst place. It is sometimes argued that compulsoryvoting provides greater incentives in this regard though we know of no formal modelshowing this. Whether this is, in fact, the case, is far from clear. SpeciÖcally, becauseof the greater turnout under compulsory voting, the chances that an individual voteris decisive are lower than under voluntary voting. Since the investment in information is only valuable in these situations, it might well be the case that voluntaryvoting o§ers better incentives in this regard. Endogenizing the information acquisition decision is clearly an important next step, but beyond the scope of the presentanalysis.17127127127127 Rational choice models of voting behavior have long been criticized on behavioralgrounds. They require voters to employ mixed strategies, they imply that swingvoters would prefer not to come to the polls, and when voting is costly, they beg thequestion as to why anyone should bother to vote at all.Many of these problems disappear if one amends the standard model to allow forrealistic features such as the possibility of abstention and heterogeneous costs of going to the polls. With these additions, there is no longer a conáict between sincere andstrategic voting and swing voters willingly participate. The model can rationalizerealistic voter turnout in elections of a given size by adjusting the distribution ofvoting costs. Whether the resulting cost distribution is plausible is an empiricalmatter. Finally, in large elections, voluntary voting almost always produces theright outcome. |