Why vote? Reading and Speaking Practice Lesson
Vocabulary
apocryphal – fictitious/ probably not true
nod – movement of the head up and down, often to show agreement
sheepish – embarrassed for having done something silly
scurry – to move quickly in an agitated or confused way
not very bright – unintelligent
Reading and Speaking
Please read the excerpt from the New York Times article, Why Vote: 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?
Can you think of a reason?
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.
According to the article, there are three reasons why people vote. Can you anticipate what they might be?
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.
Which of these possibilities to you consider most likely? Support your answer!
Evidence suggests that the 3rd answer is the correct one. Switzerland changed their voting system to add a mail-in option, where citizens no longer had to go to polling stations to cast their ballots. But instead of increasing the total number of votes as expected, it did the opposite! When it was no longer an activity that was done in public, many people didn’t bother.
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.”
Comprehension Questions
1.) How is the exchange between the economists relevant to the rest of the article?
2.) What three reasons does the author offer for why people vote? (Use your own words.)
3.) What do the terms “informal sanctions” and ‘norm adherence’ mean in the last paragraph?
Conversation Questions
1.) Why do you think most people vote?
2.) Why do you vote or not vote?
3.) Is the author saying that people shouldn’t vote?
4.) Do you agree with the author?
