Some simple economics of voting and not voting

• DOI: 10.1007/bf01718807
• Publication Date: 2005-06-12T05:47:46Z
• Authors: R. D. Tollison; T. D. Willett
• Keywords: 05 social sciences; 0506 political science

In the literature on the economic approach to politics there has been considerable attention given to the development of models to explain observed voting behavior, e.g., see Downs [5], Fraser [6], Frey [7, 8], Riker and Ordeshook [18], Russell [19], Stigler [22], and Tullock [24]. A major reason for the interest in this topic is that there appears to be no generally acceptable explanation of the importance of the role of economic variables in the decision to vote. One of the problems in this literature is the intermingling of two questions about voting and the consequent failure to distinguish what hypothesis about voting behavior is being specified. In one case the issue is raised as to why individuals vote, especially in large polities, or what factors explain the absolute turnout of voters in a given election. In another case the related, but distinct, empirical issue of why do greater roportions of high income than low income individuals vote is raised. There also as been controversy over what role variables that are not strictly economic in nature (sometimes termed "sociological") play in economic models of the voting decision. Further, the effect of information on the incentive to vote has, to our knowledge, not been fully clarified in the economic theory of democracy. Our purpose in this paper is to offer a critical review of the current state of the literature and to explore further the questions mentioned above. In Section I *The authors are, respectively, Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Research at the U. S. Treasury. Without implicating them, we would like to thank Ryan Amacher, Dennis Mueller, Roger Sherman, and Gordon Tullock for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.