Voting Behaviors

Voting is a key feature of citizenship in modern democracies and a vehicle for the exercise of consumer choice in political behavior. Parties present a range of policies, and voters choose from those options. Rhetorically, the voter-consumer is sovereign in the political marketplace because he or she decides who will be elected. However, electoral choice is an imperfect form of consumer sovereignty. In conventional models of consumer choice, demand for a product can be conceptualized as the aggregate choices of individuals: [Page 1512]the more people there are who consume an item, the greater the demand is for it. Political voting might be thought of in the same way: the more individuals who opt for party x, the greater the demand is for that party to enter the government. However, political voting involves one decision (the vote) that encompasses many different possible choices (the multiple policies on offer from each party): most voters will almost certainly disagree with at least some policies of the party they eventually vote for and may agree with some of the policies of other parties. Furthermore, where there are at least three choices on offer, no voting system can achieve a definitive ranking of voters' preferences: no matter how the vote is conducted, there will always be an alternative way of amalgamating preferences to produce a different “winner” (Arrow 1951). This contrasts with conventional consumer choice, which involves a series of discrete decisions about whether or not to purchase one item at a time. To see the difference, consider how a democratic voting model might be applied to one's weekly grocery shopping. Rather than deciding which individual items—and how many of them—to purchase, one would decide between different stores, each of which would offer a package of goods, some of which one might want, and others not. No substitution of goods within each package would be possible, however, because having opted for a particular store to supply the groceries, one would have to buy all of that store's offered package. In a democratic vote model, one would vote for the store whose package of goods most closely approximated one's own preferences, but almost inevitably, one would have to buy some things that were not desired, too much of some other items, and too few of yet others.

Rational choice theory applies an economic model of consumer behavior to voting: voters seek to maximize benefits and minimize costs, while parties try to maximize their vote. Models of two-party competition predict party convergence on the ideological middle ground when (as is common in many democracies) most voters are ideological moderates. More complex models take into account multidimensional contests fought by many parties (Merrill and Grofman 1999). Rational choice recognizes electoral “markets” are imperfect: voters lack complete information, parties are relatively monopolistic (limiting voter choice), and so on. Decisions are taken in conditions of bounded rationality, with voters relying on heuristics such as partisan identification to simplify their choices. Paradoxically, rational choice logic applied to single elections implies that no one should vote, since the costs of voting far outweigh the benefits, once the latter are discounted by the probability (invariably very low) that participation in the election will be crucial to the result. In practice, however, most electors do vote in major elections, a situation that can be explained in rational choice terms by the regular occurrence of elections: even if it is not strictly rational to vote in the current election, it may still make sense to cast a vote because that helps make one's party more viable in future elections and prevents conceding victory to undesirable parties.

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