The Myth of the Rational Voter
Bryan Caplan
Princeton University Press, 2008.
ISBN-10: 9780691138732; 296 pages.
Review by Kevin Baldeosingh
"Rule by demagogues is not an aberration," writes economist Bryan Caplan in this seminal work on voting behaviour.
"It is the natural condition of democracy. Demagoguery is the winning strategy as long as the electorate is prejudiced and credulous. Indeed, while demagogue normally connotes insincerity, this is hardly necessary. Religious voters encourage politicians to change their behaviour by feigning devotion to popular prejudices, but also prompt entry by the honestly prejudiced into the political arena."
It is likely that sales of this key work of political science have surged over the past week. Although written eight years before Donald Trump's political rise to the most powerful office in the world, Caplan's arguments provide fundamental explanations for that outcome.
The book has eight chapters, starting with The Paradox of Democracy and ending with In Praise of the Study of Folly. Caplan's prose, while not turgid or obscure, is fairly dense and requires some understanding of basic economics if the reader is to avoid getting bogged down. The term "rational", for example, as used by economists means that the individual acts in her own interest, making tradeoffs for maximum returns on minimal investment. Caplan's three main points are that empirical evidence shows that voters do not vote rationally; economic theory predicts voter irrationality; and such irrationality is the key to understanding democracy.
Although this book is considered one of the leading texts on political theory, Caplan is not a political scientist. It is this approach that he brings to bear on analysing voting in the United States and other developed democracies.
"Economists have long argued that voter ignorance is a predictable response to the fact that one votes doesn't matter," he writes. "Why study the issues if you can't change the outcome? Why control your knee-jerk emotional and ideological reactions if you can't change the outcome?"
Applied to economic behaviour, the opposite happens, because there is a cost to, say, a business owner if he allows his prejudices to determine how he runs his store. Given this, Caplan argues that "weakening democracy in favour of markets could be a good thing. No matter what you believe about how well markets work in absolute terms, if democracy starts to look worse, markets start to look better by comparison."
All through the book Caplan argues that educating citizens in economics would help improve politics.
"If voters base their policy preferences on deeply mistaken models of the economy, government is likely to perform its bread-and-butter function poorly," he writes. In this context, he also argues that the media are not the protectors of democracy they are perceive to be, precisely because "the media are also consumer driven" and "like politicians, the media show viewers what they want to see and tell them what they want to hear."
Many of Caplan's ideas are irrelevant to voting behaviour in T&T, especially since there is no assumption here that people vote rationally. Even so, Caplan's arguments can be adapted to show how voting by race is rational for the individual even if irrational in terms of the needs of the nation.
In any case, the myth does help explain why Trump is now in the Oval Office.