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Notes
This insight is often ignored even when it is clear that very large numbers of voters are being considered. For example, concern is commonly expressed that people who do not pay any income tax are motivated by the desire to get more federal benefits for which others will pay. As explained by Lee (2013), this concern ignores the implications of expressive voting.
Expressive voting is really a particular example of how market behavior can be expected to differ from political behavior even though we assume that people have the same fundamental motivation when making market decisions as when making political decisions. This view that differences in market and political behavior is best explained by changes in incentive and not changes in people is central to the perspective of public choice. As Buchanan (1984) has argued, “[t]he burden of proof rests with those who suggest wholly different models of man apply in the political and economic realms of behavior.” As Brennan (2008) points out, in Buchanan’s 1954 article, he “had already isolated a variety of ways in which political and market choices might be expected to differ, simply on the basis of rational choice logic.”
Of course, she may choose to abstain from voting, or to vote against the project because she receives a benefit from expressing her ideological opposition to government spending; a benefit that is likely not worth the amount she expects to realize by making a decisive vote in favor of the two projects from which she gains.
Stigler (1972) argued that the value of voting for a political party is not captured completely by the probability that the vote will determine which party wins the election. In addition, the ability of a party to influence legislative outcomes depends on its vote total, with a large majority making the winning party more influential than a small majority—which implies that a vote for the losing party increases its influence. Stigler’s argument is supported by Crain et al. (1988), who found that the legislative effectiveness of American presidents elected from 1924 to 1980 increased with their percentage of the popular vote. Without denying the existence of this Stigler effect, it can add only a miniscule amount to a voter’s cost of voting his ideological preference instead of his financial interest when the two differ. And when one has to vote for a particular policy indirectly through a political candidate, even the tiny probability that his vote will determine the outcome of the election is greater than the probability that it will result in the policy being enacted.
As Madison pointed out in Federalist 10, “As long as the connection subsists between his reason and his self-love, his opinions and his passions will have a reciprocal influence on each other; and the former will be objects to which the latter will attach themselves.”
Undoubtedly Tullock had read Buchanan’s (1954) article, but he did not cite it in his article. This is understandable since the relevant insight in that article was little more than an aside.
Quite recently Tullock contributed to another article, Clark et al. (2006), in which the analysis is based on a similar division of voters (that the poorest 50 percent of the country would extract paper from the richest 40 percent) to argue that the resulting redistribution would harm the poor in the long-run. It should be pointed out, however, that the 50–40 split was not derived from a voting model.
Of course, if private financial advantage was the only motivation for voting, the richest 51 percent could always form a majority coalition agreeing to transfer nothing to the poorest 49 percent. If such an agreement were reached and somehow enforced it could always be adjusted to dominate any coalition formed by the poorest 51 percent formed to transfer income to themselves from the richest 49 percent. Tullock doesn’t consider this possibility, or point out that it would make no sense to consider such a voting coalition of the richest 51 percent because private advantage is not the primary motivation for voting when there are a large number of voters.
More generally, see Caplan (2007, pp. 148–151) for evidence on the weakness of what he calls the “self-interested voter hypothesis.”
Tullock (1971, p. 390) states “[t]he end product is not that the [process] which I have been describing leads to an overinvestment in charity, but that the various pressure groups—including the pressure group of the intellectuals—get very large transfers.”
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Lee, D.R., Clark, J.R. Buchanan and Tullock ignore their own contributions to expressive voting. Public Choice 161, 113–118 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-013-0132-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-013-0132-4