politicsanalysisWikipedia
For a purely self-interested voter, casting a ballot rarely makes sense, which is the paradox of voting
The paradox of voting, also called the Downs paradox, asks why people vote at all if they only care about their own interests. A single vote almost never decides an election, so the chance of being the pivotal vote is minuscule. The private benefit of influencing the result is therefore tiny, and for a rational self-interested voter it is usually smaller than the time and effort of going to the polls. Several explanations have been offered. Some argue that people vote to express a preference or identity rather than to change the outcome. Others suggest that voters have some altruism, or that voting brings collateral benefits such as feeling like a responsible citizen, beyond the result itself.
In a large election the chance that one vote changes the outcome is so small that the expected benefit is close to zero. The cost of voting, such as time, travel and information gathering, is a fixed price, so a pure cost-benefit calculation tends to favour staying home.
The paradox shows why simple models of self-interest struggle to explain democratic participation, and it has shaped how political scientists study turnout. It matters for anyone who wants to understand why turnout rises or falls, and why voting persists even when each individual vote seems to make no difference.
The same logic appears in other collective actions, where each person's contribution seems to make no difference to the outcome. Economists call this free riding: people may benefit from a public good without contributing to it. Research on turnout suggests that social pressure, civic duty and a sense of identity help explain why many people still participate in such situations.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · text CC BY-SA 4.0
Illustrative photo · https://www.flickr.com/photos/gesteves/ Guillermo Estevez, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
