Porquê votar?
Ou, dito de outro modo, o que vale o meu voto?
"As
probabilidades de o meu voto influenciarem o resultado de uma
determinada eleição são muito, muito reduzidas" - Stephen J. Dubner and
Steven D. Levitt* -
(Para quem não consiga acesso ao artigo, transcrevo-o no final, na íntegra, do original)
O artigo foi publicado em 2005 e, desde então, a geopolítica mundial alterou-se substancialmente: Putin invade e anexa a península da Crimeia em 2014, dando o primeiro passo para a invasão da Ucrânia em fevereiro de 2022.
O grande golpe nas relações com o ocidente, inexplicavelmente surpreendido com as intenções de Putin, garantiu a este o apoio da igreja ortodoxa russa e da maioria do povo russo, e, mais perigoso ainda para a União Europeia, granjeou-lhe a admiração, e o indisfarçado apoio, de pseudo-europeísta que entraram na União com o fito de lhe sugarem as vantagens e atraiçoarem os seus valores.
Com as eleições para o Parlamento Europeu, este fim-de-semana, os extremistas podem alcançar resultados que poderão demolir as frágeis estruturas europeias.
Putin está, declaradamente, a governar em regime de economia de guerra; na União Europeia, a desunião em matéria de defesa é uma evidência gritante que só pode ser aclamada pelos que têm como intenção o descalabro da democracia e a emergência de regimes autocráticos a caminho de ditaduras.
Nos EUA balança-se também o futuro da Europa e da preservação dos valores ocidentais, porque, também nos EUA o extremismo é atractivo para quem se move pelas emoções de arraial de feira.
Passaram ontem oitenta anos após o desembarque na Normandia de milhares de soldados norte-americanos, muito dos quais deram a vida pela libertação da Europa do regime nazi.
A Europa viveu, desde a derrota dos regimes totalitários que tinham infectado quase todo o seu território, a excepção mais evidente foi o Reino Unido, o maior período de paz da sua história.
Mas, por razões que escapam à racionalidade da espécie humana, a Europa, subjugada novamente pelas vagas de submissão aos autocratas, parece reincidente a prestar-se como presa fácil dos extremismos.
Dito isto, e voltando à pergunta, o que vale o meu voto?, não posso deixar de considerar a forma como decorreram as acções de campanha eleitoral quando passaram para a rua e alguma racionalidade observada nas discussões a quatro, em estúdio, deu lugar à excitação de arraial, com o objectivo de arrastar quem se move mais pela emoção que pela razão, e concluir que o meu voto não vale nada.
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THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 11-06-05: FREAKONOMICS
Why Vote?
·
By Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt
· Nov. 6, 2005
A Swiss Turnout-Boosting Experiment
Within the economics departments at certain universities, there is a famous
but probably apocryphal story about two world-class economists who run into
each other at the voting booth.
"What are you doing here?" one asks.
"My wife made me come," the other says.
The first economist gives a confirming nod. "The same."
After a mutually sheepish moment, one of them hatches a plan: "If you
promise never to tell anyone you saw me here, I'll never tell anyone I saw
you." They shake hands, finish their polling business and scurry off.
Why would an
economist be embarrassed to be seen at the voting booth? Because voting exacts
a cost -- in time, effort, lost productivity -- with no discernible payoff
except perhaps some vague sense of having done your "civic duty." As
the economist Patricia Funk wrote in a recent paper, "A rational
individual should abstain from voting."
The odds that
your vote will actually affect the outcome of a given election are very, very,
very slim. This was documented by the economists Casey Mulligan and Charles
Hunter, who analyzed more than 56,000 Congressional and state-legislative
elections since 1898. For all the attention paid in the media to close
elections, it turns out that they are exceedingly rare. The median margin of
victory in the Congressional elections was 22 percent; in the state-legislature
elections, it was 25 percent. Even in the closest elections, it is almost never
the case that a single vote is pivotal. Of the more than 40,000 elections for
state legislator that Mulligan and Hunter analyzed, comprising nearly 1 billion
votes, only 7 elections were decided by a single vote, with 2 others tied. Of
the more than 16,000 Congressional elections, in which many more people vote,
only one election in the past 100 years -- a 1910 race in Buffalo -- was
decided by a single vote.
But there is a more important point: the closer an election is, the more
likely that its outcome will be taken out of the voters' hands -- most vividly
exemplified, of course, by the 2000 presidential race. It is true that the
outcome of that election came down to a handful of voters; but their names were
Kennedy, O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia and Thomas. And it was only the votes they
cast while wearing their robes that mattered, not the ones they may have cast
in their home precincts.
Still, people do continue to vote, in the millions. Why? Here are three
possibilities:
1. Perhaps we are just not very bright and therefore wrongly believe that
our votes will affect the outcome.
2. Perhaps we vote in the same spirit in which we buy lottery tickets.
After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are
pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad
investment. But it's fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you
buy the right to fantasize how you'd spend the winnings -- much as you get to
fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.
3. Perhaps we
have been socialized into the voting-as-civic-duty idea, believing that it's a
good thing for society if people vote, even if it's not particularly good for
the individual. And thus we feel guilty for not voting.
But wait a
minute, you say. If everyone thought about voting the way economists do, we
might have no elections at all. No voter goes to the polls actually believing
that her single vote will affect the outcome, does she? And isn't it cruel to
even suggest that her vote is not worth casting?
This is indeed a slippery slope -- the seemingly meaningless behavior of an
individual, which, in aggregate, becomes quite meaningful. Here's a similar
example in reverse. Imagine that you and your 8-year-old daughter are taking a
walk through a botanical garden when she suddenly pulls a bright blossom off a
tree.
"You shouldn't do that," you find yourself saying.
"Why not?" she asks.
"Well," you reason, "because if everyone picked one, there
wouldn't be any flowers left at all."
"Yeah, but everybody isn't picking them," she says with a look.
"Only me."
In the old days, there were more pragmatic incentives to vote. Political
parties regularly paid voters $5 or $10 to cast the proper ballot; sometimes
payment came in the form of a keg of whiskey, a barrel of flour or, in the case
of an 1890 New Hampshire Congressional race, a live pig.
Now as then,
many people worry about low voter turnout -- only slightly more than half of
eligible voters participated in the last presidential election -- but it might
be more worthwhile to stand this problem on its head and instead ask a
different question: considering that an individual's vote almost never matters,
why do so many people bother to vote at all?
The answer may lie in Switzerland. That's where Patricia Funk discovered a
wonderful natural experiment that allowed her to take an acute measure of voter
behavior.
The Swiss love to vote -- on parliamentary elections, on plebiscites, on
whatever may arise. But voter participation had begun to slip over the years
(maybe they stopped handing out live pigs there too), so a new option was introduced:
the mail-in ballot. Whereas each voter in the U.S. must register, that isn't
the case in Switzerland. Every eligible Swiss citizen began to automatically
receive a ballot in the mail, which could then be completed and returned by
mail.
From a social scientist's perspective, there was beauty in the setup of
this postal voting scheme: because it was introduced in different cantons (the
26 statelike districts that make up Switzerland) in different years, it allowed
for a sophisticated measurement of its effects over time.
Never again would any Swiss voter have to tromp to the polls during a
rainstorm; the cost of casting a ballot had been lowered significantly. An
economic model would therefore predict voter turnout to increase substantially.
Is that what happened?
Not at all. In
fact, voter turnout often decreased, especially in smaller cantons and in the
smaller communities within cantons. This finding may have serious implications
for advocates of Internet voting -- which, it has long been argued, would make
voting easier and therefore increase turnout. But the Swiss model indicates
that the exact opposite might hold true.
Why is this the
case? Why on earth would fewer people vote when the cost of doing so is
lowered?
It goes back to the incentives behind voting. If a given citizen doesn't
stand a chance of having her vote affect the outcome, why does she bother? In
Switzerland, as in the U.S., "there exists a fairly strong social norm
that a good citizen should go to the polls," Funk writes. "As long as
poll-voting was the only option, there was an incentive (or pressure) to go to
the polls only to be seen handing in the vote. The motivation could be hope for
social esteem, benefits from being perceived as a cooperator or just the
avoidance of informal sanctions. Since in small communities, people know each
other better and gossip about who fulfills civic duties and who doesn't, the
benefits of norm adherence were particularly high in this type of
community."
In other words, we do vote out of self-interest -- a conclusion that will
satisfy economists -- but not necessarily the same self-interest as indicated
by our actual ballot choice. For all the talk of how people "vote their
pocketbooks," the Swiss study suggests that we may be driven to vote less
by a financial incentive than a social one. It may be that the most valuable
payoff of voting is simply being seen at the polling place by your friends or
co-workers.
Unless, of course, you happen to be an economist.
THE WAY WE LIVE
NOW: 11-06-05: FREAKONOMICS Stephen J. Dubner and Steven D. Levitt are the
authors of "Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of
Everything." More information on the academic research behind this column
is at www.freakonomics.com.
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