The Ethics of Voting and Reason Magazine

Here’s the cover story for Reason magazine‘s November issue. It discusses my work on voting at some length.

Excerpt:

Many people like to be perceived as altruists, for example. Voting is one of the cheapest forms of altruism. If you (rightly) believe that the expected material payoff of your vote is near zero, then it’s easy enough to vote in a way that maximizes your halo rather than your bottom line. “Voting sociotropically,” Jason Brennan writes, “is cheaper and easier than volunteering at a soup kitchen or giving money to Oxfam.”

Another excerpt:

Bryan Caplan takes the idea a step further. Perhaps, he suggests, voting is more like cheering while watching the same game from your recliner in a darkened living room. If you really try, you can still tell an (ultimately unsatisfying) story about why your actions matter in the rest of the world. After all, your viewership of the game might show up in the television ratings, which boosts the team’s advertising revenue. Of course, you’re probably not a Nielsen household, so you may not show up at all in the metrics that the team’s owners can see. Which leaves solitary game watchers right there with the voters: The main payoff is that you can show up at work the next day and say you did it.

So what’s wrong with that? Individual cases of expressive voting in large elections are just as unlikely to affect the outcome of the election as other kinds of voting. But the fact of widespread expressive voting explains why elections are silly season. Politicians offer themselves up as opportunities for expressive voting, as aggregations of easily comprehensible slogans rather than as avatars of sensible policy. Ignorant expressive voters, even rationally ignorant ones, may be committing immoral acts, as Jason Brennan argues.