Why Rational Abstention Doesn’t Make Sense When You Consider Network Effects
A popular philosophical notion for voting abstention is based in economic rationalism. The theory, entitled, Rational Abstention, posits that your individual vote in something like a presidential election truly doesn’t matter. The theory reasons that the only time an individuals vote will ever matter is when there is a direct tie and the individual’s vote decides who wins, however, because the possibility of a tie is so statistically rare, the opportunity cost of voting doesn’t make rational sense. In essence, you should just say home and not waste your time in line for the voting booth.
However, in a landmark pop-sociology book entitled “Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives” written by Harvard public health guru’s Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler (2011), the authors explore how studying the network structure can create incentives to ultimately change behavior. In the case of rational abstention they posit the theories of information cascades as well as network effects.
Regarding information cascade theory, the authors demonstrate two benefits to seeing others vote. They posit that when we see others voting, especially our friends, but this can even be extended to seeing friends-of-friends vote, there’s a human tendency to want to model behavior after what we’ve seen. This occurs for two reasons, one, being that we assume those voting may know something that we don’t. For instance, maybe there’s a specific policy that will be overturned if a certain candidate is elected, or voting in your friend’s eyes is seen as a socially desirable behavior. Furthermore, there could also be direct benefit reasons to vote. I.e. if you see your friend voting and posting a picture of this practice on social media, you might reap the social benefits of voting as well. Or, maybe the implicitly boring example, that everyone in a society benefits from more people voting, as this is believed to be the foundational practice for functioning democracy.
So how does this work? In summary, the authors assert that social networks physically convey more power than any individuals’ vote. By this them mean that if everyone had to vote in a black box, and nobody could see who voted, then rational abstention would make sense. Your vote simply wouldn’t matter except in one near-impossible tie situation. However, we don’t vote in black boxes, instead we vote publicly— sharing our ideologies, choice of candidate, whether we voted— both online and in real life. This creates unintended network effects which spur social behavior. Thus, if you choose to vote, the opportunity cost of your vote isn’t merely worth just one vote, it’s actually much larger since your action has the ability to re-bound throughout the network and cause a cascade of voting. Even if you simply posted on social media reminding people to vote (and not voting yourself) you’re likely to have an effect on the network and spur increased voting behaviors. Because of these network effects the opportunity cost of voting actually becomes economically worthwhile, and renders rational abstentionism false.
In short, don’t underestimate the power of your actions, your social network is watching and responding to everything you do.
Sources:
Christakis, N.A., & Fowler, J.H. (2011). Connected: How your friends’ friends’ friends affect everything you feel, think, and do. New York: Little Brown. Chapter 6 : Politically Connected.
Zittrain, J. (2014, June 1). Facebook could decide an election without anyone ever finding out: The scary future of digital gerrymandering—and how to prevent it. The New Republic.