US economist Bryan Caplan’s ‘Myth of the rational voter‘ is well worth a look.
Caplan probably doesn’t tell us anything that would surprise us much, but the way that he addresses the conflict between the notion of rationality that underpins the idea of homo economicus and the evidence from the way that people actually vote is interesting.
He identifies a number of types of irrationality – the willingness to sentimentalise and allow loyalty to get in the way, for instance – ‘rallying around the flag’ in a time of war, even if the war may not be in the national interest.
He looks at the way that voters simply get the facts spectacularly wrong before they vote on a subject (Americans, Caplan points out, believe that the US spends a huge amount more on foreign aid than it actually does – yet it votes accordingly).
Elsewhere, he echoes Matthew Parris’ views on the public perception of immigration – not understanding the more obscure economic benefits, and among his conclusions, he urgently entreats the political elites not to flatter the majority but instead to stand up to them.
I’m not sure that it’s a message that the public are very keen on at the moment.
Caplan’s book is certainly interesting and provocative. However, in my opinion, Caplan fails to provide a convincing explanation for the major counter-evidence to his model: the long-term economic prosperity in the United States compared to the rest of the world.
Furthermore it is important to underline that if we agree with Caplan’s argument, while it might be applied to aggregative models of democracy, the same is not true for deliberative models.
Finally, as Menand stated in a review of Caplan’s book:
“Negotiating the tension between “rational” policy choices and “irrational” preferences and anxieties—between the desirability of more productivity and the desire to preserve a way of life—is what democratic politics is all about. It is a messy negotiation. Having the franchise be universal makes it even messier. If all policy decisions were straightforward economic calculations, it might be simpler and better for everyone if only people who had a grasp of economics participated in the political process. But many policy decisions don’t have an optimal answer. They involve values that are deeply contested: when life begins, whether liberty is more important than equality, how racial integration is best achieved (and what would count as genuine integration).
In the end, the group that loses these contests must abide by the outcome, must regard the wishes of the majority as legitimate. The only way it can be expected to do so is if it has been made to feel that it had a voice in the process, even if that voice is, in practical terms, symbolic. A great virtue of democratic polities is stability. The toleration of silly opinions is (to speak like an economist) a small price to pay for it.”