This paper argues that voting for social reasons ("this result will benefit society") is sensible even in large elections. The value depends on the percent turnout, but not on population size.
Interestingly, fontback's hypothesis is exactly how they modeled the choice, with a financial incentive plus some "psychological incentive"
Some people's identity gives them pleasure in voting for the candidate that rationally maximizes the Good, for some subjective measure of the good. These are the 'social preferences' Gellman talks about.
Some people's identity gives them pleasure in the tribe, and they want to vote for the people like them and around them to fit in, especially so they won't be confused with the Enemy.
Pretty much everyone has both tendencies, which are inherently in tension. This is cognitive dissonance. People don't like experiencing this, so they end up choosing to believe both in tribal politics and that their tribe is the rational one, which is the most convenient way to cut that Gordian knot.
Now, we can debate which tribe is more rational. I think currently in the USA the blue tribe has more people motivated by the desire to be seen as rational. Then again, we'd also predict that's what everyone thinks. So probably that debate wouldn't be productive.
This experiment is useful because it tells us that money is a very useful way to cut through the bullshit of tribal beliefs. It also might give us hints as to how to design our electoral system to tend toward more rational options.
And in addition, the more and more fiercely we tribally associate, the less and less we want to do with the other tribes. This has gone to the extent that certain fields of employment, or even fields of science are largely owned on tribal lines.
Conservatives largely outnumber liberals in fields like agriculture, while liberals dominate social sciences. This sounds fine, but peer review demands cultural diversity as well, or our own cognitive bias imparts blind-spots on the work. The only fix for those blind spots is cultural diversity, and the only way people can be happy with that cultural diversity is to re-tie their Gordian knots and learn to accept other people as other people, and not the devil monsters we tend to equate them as today.
The current extreme polarization in the US is new and fairly unusual, in historical terms. It could be an inevitable phase that other counties will reach too, or it could just be a random artifact of the US's history and political system. Very few countries have a voting system that locks in the main two parties as strongly as the US, for example.
The idea that all politics is purely about tribal identity, and that "rationality" is a myth, would seem to suggest that we've never made any real social advances. But I'd count things like the outlawing of slavery as advances.
It reminds me of the extreme view of social structures in science (which Thomas Kuhn subscribed to, if I remember right), that all scientific "advances" and "revolutions" are just changes in fashion as one generation of scientists succeeds another. But each advance does in fact get us closer to the truth, even if we never quite reach it.
Without getting into the whys and wherefores, my main concern is that as we eliminate some forms of tribal clustering (ethnic, gender, class, etc.) we are simply replacing them with other forms, namely political affiliation or wedge issues. Particularly, I'm concerned with tribal clustering on wedge issues that don't affect the quality of work a person might do.
If you truly believe that one candidate is a lizard-person, the rational thing is to vote against them. When everyone you know and trust also believes in lizard-people, and you are unable to test for yourself, the rational person also believes. The answer to the problem is accuracy in facts, a wider dissemination of reality. The rest will follow.
The problem (according to Caplan) is that voters don't learn how society works and how different policies would affect it. So they support policies that sound good to the uninformed.
And here we are :)
It's too simplistic to put the entire blame on voters - I don't think the US has a monopoly on "low information"/uninformed/apathetic voters when compared to other OECD nations.
Surely different social expectations on the issues squeezing the middle class (health/child/education costs), a different (more partisan?) media landscape, geographic size, a polarized judicial system (who weigh in on the "culture wars", campaign financing, war against drugs etc), and deeply entrenched financial interests have some significant influence upon our elected officials.
The cost of becoming an expert in society, economics, etc is vastly bigger than the benefit you can expect to get out of it.
...in national elections. Federal systems are designed with this in mind. In recent decades, more and more issues have become national issues, which erodes the influence of the individual voter. And, on top of that, if the power of the vote is ineffective, you can always move in a federal system. So the erosion of choice is compounded.
Big organizations are the only entities that can compete on a national scale, but your actions absolutely can matter more locally. That's a strong reason to favor more local government, IMO.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/11/10/the-dance-of-the-dunces-...