election ethics research paper

Table of Contents
Random Entry
Chronological
Editorial Information
About the SEP
Editorial Board
How to Cite the SEP
Special Characters
Advanced Tools
Support the SEP
PDFs for SEP Friends
Make a Donation
SEPIA for Libraries
Entry Contents

Bibliography

Academic tools.

Friends PDF Preview
Author and Citation Info
Back to Top

The Ethics and Rationality of Voting

This entry focuses on six major questions concerning the rationality and morality of voting:

Is it rational for an individual citizen to vote?
Is there a moral duty to vote?
Are there moral obligations regarding how citizens vote?
Is it justifiable for governments to compel citizens to vote?
Is it permissible to buy, trade, and sell votes?
Who ought to have the right to vote, and should every citizen have an equal vote?

Question 6 concerns the broader question of whether democratic forms of government are preferable to the alternatives; see Christiano (2006) on the justification of democracy for a longer discussion. See also Pacuit (2011) for a discussion of which voting method is best suited to reflect the “will of the group”. See Gosseries (2005) for a discussion of arguments for and against the secret ballot.

1.1 Voting to Change the Outcome

1.2 voting to change the “mandate”, 1.3 other reasons to vote, 2.1 a general moral obligation not to vote, 3.1 the expressivist ethics of voting, 3.2 the epistemic ethics of voting, 4. the justice of compulsory voting, 5. the ethics of vote buying, 6.1 democratic challenges to one person, one vote, 6.2 non-democratic challenges to one person, one vote, other internet resources, related entries, 1. the rationality of voting.

The act of voting has an opportunity cost. It takes time and effort that could be used for other valuable things, such as working for pay, volunteering at a soup kitchen, or playing video games. Further, identifying issues, gathering political information, thinking or deliberating about that information, and so on, also take time and effort which could be spent doing other valuable things. Economics, in its simplest form, predicts that rational people will perform an activity only if doing so maximizes expected utility. However, economists have long worried that, that for nearly every individual citizen, voting does not maximize expected utility. This leads to the “paradox of voting”(Downs 1957): Since the expected costs (including opportunity costs) of voting appear to exceed the expected benefits, and since voters could always instead perform some action with positive overall utility, it’s surprising that anyone votes.

However, whether voting is rational or not depends on just what voters are trying to do. Instrumental theories of the rationality of voting hold that it can be rational to vote when the voter’s goal is to influence or change the outcome of an election, including the “mandate” the winning candidate receives. (The mandate theory of elections holds that a candidate’s effectiveness in office, i.e., her ability to get things done, is in part a function of how large or small a lead she had over her competing candidates during the election.) In contrast, the expressive theory of voting holds that voters vote in order to express themselves and their fidelity to certain groups or ideas. Alternatively, one might hold that voting is rational because it is has consumption value; many people enjoy political participation for its own sake or for being able to show others that they voted. Finally, if one believes, as most democratic citizens say they do (Mackie 2010), that voting is a substantial moral obligation, then voting could be rational because it is necessary to discharge one’s obligation.

One reason a person might vote is to influence, or attempt to change, the outcome of an election. Suppose there are two candidates, D and R . Suppose Sally prefers D to R . Suppose she correctly believes that D would do a trillion dollars more overall good than R would do. If her beliefs were correct, then by hypothesis, it would be best if D won.

Here, casting the expected value difference between the two candidates in monetary terms is a simplifying assumption. Whether political outcomes can be described in monetary terms as such is not without controversy. To illustrate, suppose the difference between two candidates came down entirely to how many lives would be lost in the way they would conduct a current war. Whether we can translate “lives lost” into dollar terms is controversial. Further, whether we can commensurate all the distinct goods and harms a candidate might cause onto a common scale is also controversial.

Even if the expected value difference between two candidates could be expressed on some common value scale, such as in monetary terms, this leaves open whether the typical voter is aware of or can generally estimate that difference. Empirical work generally finds that most voters are badly informed, and further, that many of them are not voting for the purpose of promoting certain policies or platforms over others (Achen and Bartels 2016; Kinder and Kalmoe 2017; Mason 2017). Beyond that, estimating the value difference between candidates requires evaluating complex counterfactuals, estimating what various candidates are likely to achieve, and determining what the outcomes of these actions would be (Freiman 2020).

These worries aside, even if Sally is correct that D will do a trillion dollars more good than R , this does not yet show it is rational for Sally to vote for D . Instead, this depends on how likely it is that her vote will make a difference. In much the same way, it might be worth $200 million to win the lottery, but that does not imply it is rational to buy a lottery ticket.

Suppose Sally’s only goal, in voting, is to change the outcome of the election between two major candidates. In that case, the expected value of her vote ($U_v$) is:

where p represents the probability that Sally’s vote is decisive, $[V(D) - V(R)]$ represents (in monetary terms) the difference in the expected value of the two candidates, and C represents the opportunity cost of voting. In short, the value of her vote is the value of the difference between the two candidates discounted by her chance of being decisive, minus the opportunity cost of voting. In this way, voting is indeed like buying a lottery ticket. Unless $p[V(D) - V(R)] > C$, then it is (given Sally’s stated goals) irrational for her to vote.

The equation above models the rationality of Sally’s choice to vote under the assumption that she is simply trying to change the outcome of the election, and gets no further benefit from voting. Further, the equation assumes her vote confers no other benefit to others than having some chance of changing which candidate wins. However, these are controversial simplifying assumptions. It is possible that the choice to cast a vote may induce others to vote, might improve the quality of the ground decision by adding cognitive diversity, might have some marginal influence on which candidates or platforms parties run, or might have some other effect not modeled in the equation above.

Again, it is controversial among some philosophers whether the difference in value between two candidates can be expressed, in principle, in monetary terms. Nevertheless, the point generalizes in some way. If we are discussing the instrumental value of a vote, then the general point is that the vote depends on the expected difference in value between the chosen candidate and the next best alternative, discounted by the probability of the vote breaking a tie, and we must then take into account the opportunity cost of voting. For instance, if two candidates were identical except that one would save one more life than another, but one had a 1 in 1 billion chance of being decisive, and instead of voting one could save a drowning toddler, then it seems voting is not worthwhile, even if we cannot assign an exact monetary value to thee consequences.

There is some debate among economists, political scientists, and philosophers over the precise way to calculate the probability that a vote will be decisive. Nevertheless, they generally agree that the probability that the modal individual voter in a typical election will break a tie is small. Binomial models of voting estimate the probability of a vote being decisive by modeling voters as if they were weighted coins and then asking what the probability is that a weighted coin will come up heads exactly 50% of the time. These models generally imply that the probability of being decisive, if any candidate has a lead, is vanishingly small, which in turn implies that the expected benefit of voting (i.e., $p[V(D) - V(R)]$) for a good candidate is worth far less than a millionth of a penny (G. Brennan and Lomasky 1993: 56–7, 119). A more optimistic estimate in the literature, which uses statistical estimate techniques based on past elections, claims that in a typical presidential election, American voters have widely varying chances of being decisive depending on which state they vote in. This model still predicts that a typical vote in a “safe” states, like California, has a vanishingly small chance of making a difference, but suggests that that a vote in very close states could have on the order of a 1 in 10 million chance of breaking a tie (Edlin, Gelman, and Kaplan 2007). Thus, on both of these popular models, whether voting for the purpose of changing the outcome is rational depends upon the facts on the ground, including how close the election is and how significant the value difference is between the candidates. The binomial model suggests it will almost never be rational to vote, while the statistical model suggests it will be rational for voters to vote in sufficiently close elections or in swing states.

However, some claim even these assessments are optimistic. One worry is that if a major election in most places came down to a single vote, the issue might be decided in the courts after extensive lawsuits (Somin 2013). Further, in making such estimates, we have assumed that voters can reliably identify which candidate is better and reliably estimate how much better that candidate is. But perhaps voters cannot. After all, showing that individual votes matter is a double-edged sword; the more expected good an individual vote can do, the more expected harm it can do (J. Brennan 2011a; Freiman 2020).

One popular response to the paradox of voting is to posit that voters are not trying to determine who wins, but instead trying to change the “mandate” the elected candidate receives. The assumption here is that an elected official’s efficacy—i.e., her ability to get things done in office—depends in part on how large of a majority vote she received. If that were true, I might vote for what I expect to be the winning candidate in order to increase her mandate, or vote against the expected winner to reduce her mandate. The virtue of the mandate hypothesis, if it were true, is that it could explain why it would be rational to vote even in elections where one candidate enjoys a massive lead coming into the election.

However, the mandate argument faces two major problems. First, even if we assume that such mandates exist, to know whether voting is rational, we would need to know how much the nth voter’s vote increases the marginal effectiveness of her preferred candidate, or reduces the marginal effectiveness of her dispreferred candidate. Suppose voting for the expected winning candidate costs me $15 worth of my time. It would be rational for me to vote only if I believed my individual vote would give the winning candidate at least $15 worth of electoral efficacy (and I care about the increased efficiency as much or more than my opportunity costs). In principle, whether individual votes change the “mandate” this much is something that political scientists could measure, and indeed, they have tried to do so.

But this brings us to the second, deeper problem: Political scientists have done extensive empirical work trying to test whether electoral mandates exist, and they now roundly reject the mandate hypothesis (Dahl 1990b; Noel 2010). A winning candidate’s ability to get things done is generally not affected by how small or large of a margin she wins by.

Perhaps voting is rational not as a way of trying to change how effective the elected politician will be, but instead as a way of trying to change the kind of mandate the winning politician enjoys (Guerrero 2010). Perhaps a vote could transform a candidate from a delegate to a trustee. A delegate tries to do what she believes her constituents want, but a trustee has the normative legitimacy to do what she believes is best.

Suppose for the sake of argument that trustee representatives are significantly more valuable than delegates, and that what makes a representative a trustee rather than a delegate is her large margin of victory. Unfortunately, this does not yet show that the expected benefits of voting exceed the expected costs. Suppose (as in Guerrero 2010: 289) that the distinction between a delegate and trustee lies on a continuum, like difference between bald and hairy. To show voting is rational, one would need to show that the marginal impact of an individual vote, as it moves a candidate a marginal degree from delegate to trustee, is higher than the opportunity cost of voting. If voting costs me $15 worth of time, then, on this theory, it would be rational to vote only if my vote is expected to move my favorite candidate from delegate to trustee by an increment worth at least $15 (Guerrero 2010: 295–297).

Alternatively, suppose that there were a determinate threshold (either known or unknown) of votes at which a winning candidate is suddenly transformed from being a delegate to a trustee. By casting a vote, the voter has some chance of decisively pushing her favored candidate over this threshold. However, just as the probability that her vote will decide the election is vanishingly small, so the probability that her vote will decisively transform a representative from a delegate into a trustee would be vanishingly small. Indeed, the formula for determining decisiveness in transforming a candidate into a trustee would be roughly the same as determining whether the voter would break a tie. Thus, suppose it’s a billion or even a trillion dollars better for a representative to be a trustee rather than a candidate. Even if so, the expected benefit of an individual vote is still less than a penny, which is lower than the opportunity cost of voting. Again, it’s wonderful to win the lottery, but that doesn’t mean it’s rational to buy a ticket.

Other philosophers have attempted to shift the focus on other ways individual votes might be said to “make a difference”. Perhaps by voting, a voter has a significant chance of being among the “causally efficacious set” of votes, or is in some way causally responsible for the outcome (Tuck 2008; Goldman 1999).

On these theories, what voters value is not changing the outcome, but being agents who have participated in causing various outcomes. These causal theories of voting claim that voting is rational provided the voter sufficiently cares about being a cause or among the joint causes of the outcome. Voters vote because they wish to bear the right kind of causal responsibility for outcomes, even if their individual influence is small.

What these alternative theories make clear is that whether voting is rational depends in part upon what the voters’ goals are. If their goal is to in some way change the outcome of the election, or to change which policies are implemented, then voting is indeed irrational, or rational only in unusual circumstances or for a small subset of voters. However, perhaps voters have other goals.

The expressive theory of voting (G. Brennan and Lomasky 1993) holds that voters vote in order to express themselves. On the expressive theory, voting is a consumption activity rather than a productive activity; it is more like reading a book for pleasure than it is like reading a book to develop a new skill. On this theory, though the act of voting is private, voters regard voting as an apt way to demonstrate and express their commitment to their political team. Voting is like wearing a Metallica T-shirt at a concert or doing the wave at a sports game. Sports fans who paint their faces the team colors do not generally believe that they, as individuals, will change the outcome of the game, but instead wish to demonstrate their commitment to their team. Even when watching games alone, sports fans cheer and clap for their teams. Perhaps voting is like this.

This “expressive theory of voting” is untroubled by and indeed partly supported by the empirical findings that most voters are ignorant about basic political facts (Somin 2013; Delli Carpini and Keeter, 1996). The expressive theory is also untroubled by and indeed partly supported by work in political psychology showing that most citizens suffer from significant “intergroup bias”: we tend to automatically form groups, and to be irrationally loyal to and forgiving of our own group while irrationally hateful of other groups (Lodge and Taber 2013; Haidt 2012; Westen, Blagov, Harenski, Kilts, and Hamann 2006; Westen 2008). Voters might adopt ideologies in order to signal to themselves and others that they are certain kinds of people. For example, suppose Bob wants to express that he is a patriot and a tough guy. He thus endorses hawkish military actions, e.g., that the United States nuke Russia for interfering with Ukraine. It would be disastrous for Bob were the US to do what he wants. However, since Bob’s individual vote for a militaristic candidate has little hope of being decisive, Bob can afford to indulge irrational and misinformed beliefs about public policy and express those beliefs at the polls.

Another simple and plausible argument is that it can be rational to vote in order to discharge a perceived duty to vote (Mackie 2010). Surveys indicate that most citizens in fact believe there is a duty to vote or to “do their share” (Mackie 2010: 8–9). If there are such duties, and these duties are sufficiently weighty, then it would be rational for most voters to vote.

2. The Moral Obligation to Vote

Surveys show that most citizens in contemporary democracies believe there is some sort of moral obligation to vote (Mackie 2010: 8–9). Other surveys show most moral and political philosophers agree (Schwitzgebel and Rust 2010). They tend to believe that citizens have a duty to vote even when these citizens rightly believe their favored party or candidate has no serious chance of winning (Campbell, Gurin, and Mill 1954: 195). Further, most people seem to think that the duty to vote specifically means a duty to turn out to vote (perhaps only to cast a blank ballot), rather than a duty to vote a particular way. On this view, citizens have a duty simply to cast a vote, but nearly any good-faith vote is morally acceptable.

Many popular arguments for a duty to vote rely upon the idea that individual votes make a significant difference. For instance, one might argue that that there is a duty to vote because there is a duty to protect oneself, a duty to help others, or to produce good government, or the like. However, these arguments face the problem, as discussed in section 1, that individual votes have vanishingly small instrumental value (or disvalue)

For instance, one early hypothesis was that voting might be a form of insurance, meant to to prevent democracy from collapsing (Downs 1957: 257). Following this suggestion, suppose one hypothesizes that citizens have a duty to vote in order to help prevent democracy from collapsing. Suppose there is some determinate threshold of votes under which a democracy becomes unstable and collapses. The problem here is that just as there is a vanishingly small probability that any individual’s vote would decide the election, so there is a vanishingly small chance that any vote would decisively put the number of votes above that threshold. Alternatively, suppose that as fewer and fewer citizens vote, the probability of democracy collapsing becomes incrementally higher. If so, to show there is a duty to vote, one would first need to show that the marginal expected benefits of the nth vote, in reducing the chance of democratic collapse, exceed the expected costs (including opportunity costs).

A plausible argument for a duty to vote would thus not depend on individual votes having significant expected value or impact on government or civic culture. Instead, a plausible argument for a duty to vote should presume that individual votes make little difference in changing the outcome of election, but then identify a reason why citizens should vote anyway.

One suggestion (Beerbohm 2012) is that citizens have a duty to vote to avoid complicity with injustice. On this view, representatives act in the name of the citizens. Citizens count as partial authors of the law, even when the citizens do not vote or participate in government. Citizens who refuse to vote are thus complicit in allowing their representatives to commit injustice. Perhaps failure to resist injustice counts as kind of sponsorship. (This theory thus implies that citizens do not merely have a duty to vote rather than abstain, but specifically have a duty to vote for candidates and policies that will reduce injustice.)

Another popular argument, which does not turn on the efficacy of individual votes, is the “Generalization Argument”:

What if everyone were to stay home and not vote? The results would be disastrous! Therefore, I (you/she) should vote. (Lomasky and G. Brennan 2000: 75)

This popular argument can be parodied in a way that exposes its weakness. Consider:

What if everyone were to stay home and not farm? Then we would all starve to death! Therefore, I (you/she) should each become farmers. (Lomasky and G. Brennan 2000: 76)

The problem with this argument, as stated, is that even if it would be disastrous if no one or too few performed some activity, it does not follow that everyone ought to perform it. Instead, one conclude that it matters that sufficient number of people perform the activity. In the case of farming, we think it’s permissible for people to decide for themselves whether to farm or not, because market incentives suffice to ensure that enough people farm.

However, even if the Generalization Argument, as stated, is unsound, perhaps it is on to something. There are certain classes of actions in which we tend to presume everyone ought to participate (or ought not to participate). For instance, suppose a university places a sign saying, “Keep off the newly planted grass.” It’s not as though the grass will die if one person walks on it once. If I were allowed to walk on it at will while the rest of you refrained from doing so, the grass would probably be fine. Still, it would seem unfair if the university allowed me to walk on the grass at will but forbade everyone else from doing so. It seems more appropriate to impose the duty to keep off the lawn equally on everyone. Similarly, if the government wants to raise money to provide a public good, it could just tax a randomly chosen minority of the citizens. However, it seems more fair or just for everyone (at least above a certain income threshold) to pay some taxes, to share in the burden of providing police protection.

We should thus ask: is voting more like the first kind of activity, in which it is only imperative that enough people do it, or the second kind, in which it’s imperative that everyone do it? One difference between the two kinds of activities is what abstention does to others. If I abstain from farming, I don’t thereby take advantage of or free ride on farmers’ efforts. Rather, I compensate them for whatever food I eat by buying that food on the market. In the second set of cases, if I freely walk across the lawn while everyone else walks around it, or if I enjoy police protection but don’t pay taxes, it appears I free ride on others’ efforts. They bear an uncompensated differential burden in maintaining the grass or providing police protection, and I seem to be taking advantage of them.

A defender of a duty to vote might thus argue that non-voters free ride on voters. Non-voters benefit from the government that voters provide, but do not themselves help to provide government.

There are at least a few arguments for a duty to vote that do not depend on the controversial assumption that individual votes make a difference:

The Generalization/Public Goods/Debt to Society Argument : Claims that citizens who abstain from voting thereby free ride on the provision of good government, or fail to pay their “debts to society”.
The Civic Virtue Argument : Claims that citizens have a duty to exercise civic virtue, and thus to vote.
The Complicity Argument : Claims that citizens have a duty to vote (for just outcomes) in order to avoid being complicit in the injustice their governments commit.

However, there is a general challenge to these arguments in support of a duty to vote. Call this the particularity problem : To show that there is a duty to vote, it is not enough to appeal to some goal G that citizens plausibly have a duty to support, and then to argue that voting is one way they can support or help achieve G . Instead, proponents of a duty to vote need to show specifically that voting is the only way, or the required way, to support G (J. Brennan 2011a). The worry is that the three arguments above might only show that voting is one way among many to discharge the duty in question. Indeed, it might not be even be an especially good way, let alone the only or obligatory way to discharge the duty.

For instance, suppose one argues that citizens should vote because they ought to exercise civic virtue. One must explain why a duty to exercise civic virtue specifically implies a duty to vote, rather than a duty just to perform one of thousands of possible acts of civic virtue. Or, if a citizen has a duty to to be an agent who helps promote other citizens’ well-being, it seems this duty could be discharged by volunteering, making art, or working at a productive job that adds to the social surplus. If a citizen has a duty to to avoid complicity in injustice, it seems that rather than voting, she could engage in civil disobedience; write letters to newspaper editors, pamphlets, or political theory books; donate money; engage in conscientious abstention; protest; assassinate criminal political leaders; or do any number of other activities. It’s unclear why voting is special or required.

Note that the particularity problem need not be framed in consequentialist terms, i.e., both defenders and critics of the duty to vote need not say that what determines whether voting is morally required depends on whether voting has the highest expected consequences. Rather, the issue is whether voting is simply one of many ways to discharge an underlying duty or respond to underlying reasons, or whether voting is in some way special and unique, such that these reasons select voting in particular as an obligatory means of responding to these underlying reasons.

Maskivker (2019) responds partly to this objection by saying, in effect, “Why not both?” J. Brennan (2011a) and Freiman (2020) say that the underlying grounds for any duty to vote can be discharged (and discharged better) through actions other than voting. Maskivker takes this to suggest not that voting is optional, but that one should vote (if one is already sufficiently well-informed and publicly-spirited) and also performs these other actions. Maskivker grounds her argument on a deontological duty of easy aid: if one can provide aid to others at very low cost to oneself, then one should do so. For already well-informed citizens, voting is an instance of easy aid.

While many hold that it is obligatory to vote, a few have argued that many people have an obligation not to vote under special circumstances. For instance, Sheehy (2002) argues that voting when one is indifferent to the election is unfair. He argues that if one’s vote makes a difference, it could be to disappoint what otherwise would be have been the majority coalition, whose position is now thwarted by those who, by hypothesis, have no preference.

Another argument holds that voting might be wrong because it is an ineffective form of altruism. Freiman (2020) argues that when people discharge their obligations to help and aid others, they are obligated to pursue effective rather than ineffective forms of altruism (see also MacAskill 2015). For instance, suppose one has an obligation to give a certain amount to charity each year. This obligation is not fundamentally about spending a certain percentage of one’s money. If a person gave 10% of their income to a charity that did no good at all, or which made the world worse, one would not have discharged the obligation to act beneficently. Similarly, Freiman argues, if a person is voting for the purpose of aiding and helping others, then they would at the very least need to be sufficiently well-informed to vote for the better candidate, a condition few voters meet (see section 3.2 below). In part because most voters are in no position to judge whether they are voting for the better or worse candidates, and in part simply because individual votes make little difference, votes and most other forms of political action (such as donating to political campaigns, canvassing, volunteering, and the like) are highly ineffective forms of altruism. Freiman claims that we are instead obligated to pursue effective forms of altruism, such as collecting and making donations to the Against Malaria Foundation.

3. Moral Obligations Regarding How One Votes

Most people appear to believe that there is a duty to cast a vote (perhaps including a blank ballot) rather than abstain (Mackie 2010: 8–9), but this leaves open whether they believe there is a duty to vote in any particular way. Some philosophers and political theorists have argued there are ethical obligations attached to how one chooses to vote. For instance, many deliberative democrats (see Christiano 2006) believe not only that every citizen has a duty to vote, but also that they must vote in publicly-spirited ways, after engaging in various forms of democratic deliberation. In contrast, some (G. Brennan and Lomasky 1993; J. Brennan 2009, 2011a) argue that while there is no general duty to vote (abstention is permissible), those citizens who do choose to vote have duties affecting how they vote. They argue that while it is not wrong to abstain, it is wrong to vote badly , in some theory-specified sense of “badly”.

Note that the question of how one ought to vote is distinct from the question of whether one ought to have the right to vote. The right to vote licenses a citizen to cast a vote. It requires the state to permit the citizen to vote and then requires the state to count that vote. This leaves open whether some ways a voter could vote could be morally wrong, or whether other ways of voting might be morally obligatory. In parallel, my right of free association arguably includes the right to join the Ku Klux Klan, while my right of free speech arguably includes the right to advocate an unjust war. Still, it would be morally wrong for me to do either of these things, though doing so is within my rights. Thus, just as someone can, without contradiction, say, “You have the right to have racist attitudes, but you should not,” so a person can, without contradiction, say, “You have the right to vote for that candidate, but you should not.”

A theory of voting ethics might include answers to any of the following questions:

The Intended Beneficiary of the Vote : Whose interests should the voter take into account when casting a vote? May the voter vote selfishly, or should she vote sociotropically? If the latter, on behalf of which group ought she vote: her demographic group(s), her local jurisdiction, the nation, or the entire world? Is it permissible to vote when one has no stake in the election, or is otherwise indifferent to the outcome?
The Substance of the Vote : Are there particular candidates or policies that the voter is obligated to support, or not to support? For instance, is a voter obligated to vote for whatever would best produce the most just outcomes, according to the correct theory of justice? Must the voter vote for candidates with good character? May the voter vote strategically, or must she vote in accordance with her sincere preferences?
Epistemic Duties Regarding Voting : Are voters required to have a particular degree of knowledge, or exhibit a particular kind of epistemic rationality, in forming their voting preferences? Is it permissible to vote in ignorance, on the basis of beliefs about social scientific matters that are formed without sufficient evidence?

Recall that one important theory of voting behavior holds that most citizens vote not in order to influence the outcome of the election or influence government policies, but in order to express themselves (G. Brennan and Lomasky 1993). They vote to signal to themselves and to others that they are loyal to certain ideas, ideals, or groups. For instance, I might vote Democrat to signal that I’m compassionate and fair, or Republican to signal I’m responsible, moral, and tough. If voting is primarily an expressive act, then perhaps the ethics of voting is an ethics of expression (G. Brennan and Lomasky 1993: 167–198). We can assess the morality of voting by asking what it says about a voter that she voted like that:

To cast a Klan ballot is to identify oneself in a morally significant way with the racist policies that the organization espouses. One thereby lays oneself open to associated moral liability whether the candidate has a small, large, or zero probability of gaining victory, and whether or not one’s own vote has an appreciable likelihood of affecting the election result. (G. Brennan and Lomasky 1993: 186)

The idea here is that if it’s wrong (even if it’s within my rights) in general for me to express sincere racist attitudes, and so it’s wrong for me to express sincere racist commitments at the polls. Similar remarks apply to other wrongful attitudes. To the extent it is wrong for me to express sincere support for illiberal, reckless, or bad ideas, it would also be wrong for me to vote for candidates who support those ideas.

Of course, the question of just what counts as wrongful and permissible expression is complicated. There is also a complicated question of just what voting expresses. What I think my vote expresses might be different from what it expresses to others, or it might be that it expresses different things to different people. The expressivist theory of voting ethics acknowledges these difficulties, and replies that whatever we would say about the ethics of expression in general should presumably apply to expressive voting.

Consider the question: What do doctors owe patients, parents owe children, or jurors owe defendants (or, perhaps, society)? Doctors owe patients proper care, and to discharge their duties, they must 1) aim to promote their patients’ interests, and 2) reason about how to do so in a sufficiently informed and rational way. Parents similarly owe such duties to their children. Jurors similarly owe society at large, or perhaps more specifically the defendant, duties to 1) try to determine the truth, and 2) do so in an informed and rational way. The doctors, parents, and jurors are fiduciaries of others. They owe a duty of care, and this duty of care brings with it certain epistemic responsibilities .

One might try to argue that voters owe similar duties of care to the governed. Perhaps voters should vote 1) for what they perceive to be the best outcomes (consistent with strategic voting) and 2) make such decisions in a sufficiently informed and rational way. How voters vote has significant impact on political outcomes, and can help determine matters of peace and war, life and death, prosperity and poverty. Majority voters do not just choose for themselves, but for everyone, including dissenting minorities, children, non-voters, resident aliens, and people in other countries affected by their decisions. For this reason, voting seems to be a morally charged activity (Christiano 2006; J. Brennan 2011a; Beerbohm 2012).

That said, one clear disanalogy between the relationship doctors have with patients and voters have with the governed is that individual voters have only a vanishingly small chance of making a difference. The expected harm of an incompetent individual vote is vanishingly small, while the expected harm of incompetent individual medical decisions is high.

However, perhaps the point holds anyway. Define a “collectively harmful activity” as an activity in which a group is imposing or threatening to impose harm, or unjust risk of harm, upon other innocent people, but the harm will be imposed regardless of whether individual members of that group drop out. It’s plausible that one might have an obligation to refrain from participating in such activities, i.e., a duty to keep one’s hands clean.

To illustrate, suppose a 100-member firing squad is about to shoot an innocent child. Each bullet will hit the child at the same time, and each shot would, on its own, be sufficient to kill her. You cannot stop them, so the child will die regardless of what you do. Now, suppose they offer you the opportunity to join in and shoot the child with them. You can make the 101st shot. Again, the child will die regardless of what you do. Is it permissible for you join the firing squad? Most people have a strong intuition that it is wrong to join the squad and shoot the child. One plausible explanation of why it is wrong is that there may be a general moral prohibition against participating in these kinds of activities. In these kinds of cases, we should try to keep our hands clean.

Perhaps this “clean-hands principle” can be generalized to explain why individual acts of ignorant, irrational, or malicious voting are wrong. The firing-squad example is somewhat analogous to voting in an election. Adding or subtracting a shooter to the firing squad makes no difference—the girl will die anyway. Similarly, with elections, individual votes make no difference. In both cases, the outcome is causally overdetermined. Still, the irresponsible voter is much like a person who volunteers to shoot in the firing squad. Her individual bad vote is of no consequence—just as an individual shot is of no consequence—but she is participating in a collectively harmful activity when she could easily keep her hands clean (J. Brennan 2011a, 68–94).

Voting rates in many contemporary democracies are (according to many observers) low, and seem in general to be falling. The United States, for instance, barely manages about 60% in presidential elections and 45% in other elections (Brennan and Hill 2014: 3). Many other countries have similarly low rates. Some democratic theorists, politicians, and others think this is problematic, and advocate compulsory voting as a solution. In a compulsory voting regime, citizens are required to vote by law; if they fail to vote without a valid excuse, they incur some sort of penalty.

One major argument for compulsory voting is what we might call the Demographic or Representativeness Argument (Lijphart 1997; Engelen 2007; Galston 2011; Hill in J. Brennan and Hill 2014: 154–173; Singh 2015). The argument begins by noting that in voluntary voting regimes, citizens who choose to vote are systematically different from those who choose to abstain. The rich are more likely to vote than the poor. The old are more likely to vote than the young. Men are more likely to vote than women. In many countries, ethnic minorities are less likely to vote than ethnic majorities. More highly educated people are more likely to vote than less highly educated people. Married people are more likely to vote than non-married people. Political partisans are more likely to vote than true independents (Leighley and Nagler 1992; Evans 2003: 152–6). In short, under voluntary voting, the electorate—the citizens who actually choose to vote—are not fully representative of the public at large. The Demographic Argument holds that since politicians tend to give voters what they want, in a voluntary voting regime, politicians will tend to advance the interests of advantaged citizens (who vote disproportionately) over the disadvantaged (who tend not to vote). Compulsory voting would tend to ensure that the disadvantaged vote in higher numbers, and would thus tend to ensure that everyone’s interests are properly represented.

Relatedly, one might argue compulsory voting helps citizens overcome an “assurance problem” (Hill 2006). The thought here is that an individual voter realizes her individual vote has little significance. What’s important is that enough other voters like her vote. However, she cannot easily coordinate with other voters and ensure they will vote with her. Compulsory voting solves this problem. For this reason, Lisa Hill (2006: 214–15) concludes, “Rather than perceiving the compulsion as yet another unwelcome form of state coercion, compulsory voting may be better understood as a coordination necessity in mass societies of individual strangers unable to communicate and coordinate their preferences.”

Whether the Demographic Argument succeeds or not depends on a few assumptions about voter and politician behavior. First, political scientists overwhelmingly find that voters do not vote their self-interest, but instead vote for what they perceive to be the national interest. (See the dozens of papers cited at Brennan and Hill 2014: 38–9n28.) Second, it might turn out that disadvantaged citizens are not informed enough to vote in ways that promote their interests—they might not have sufficient social scientific knowledge to know which candidates or political parties will help them (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Caplan 2007; Somin 2013). Third, it may be that even in a compulsory voting regime, politicians can get away with ignoring the policy preferences of most voters (Gilens 2012; Bartels 2010).

In fact, contrary to many theorists’ expectations, it appears that compulsory voting has no significant effect on individual political knowledge (that is, it does not induce ignorant voters to become better informed), individual political conversation and persuasion, individual propensity to contact politicians, the propensity to work with others to address concerns, participation in campaign activities, the likelihood of being contacted by a party or politician, the quality of representation, electoral integrity, the proportion of female members of parliament, support for small or third parties, support for the left, or support for the far right (Birch 2009; Highton and Wolfinger 2001). Political scientists have also been unable to demonstrate that compulsory voting leads to more egalitarian or left-leaning policy outcomes. The empirical literature so far shows that compulsory voting gets citizens to vote, but it’s not clear it does much else.

Many citizens of modern democracies believe that vote buying and selling are immoral (Tetlock 2000). Many philosophers agree; they argue it is wrong to buy, trade, or sell votes (Satz 2010: 102; Sandel 2012: 104–5). Richard Hasen reviews the literature on vote buying and concludes that people have offered three main arguments against it. He says,

Despite the almost universal condemnation of core vote buying, commentators disagree on the underlying rationales for its prohibition. Some offer an equality argument against vote buying: the poor are more likely to sell their votes than are the wealthy, leading to political outcomes favoring the wealthy. Others offer an efficiency argument against vote buying: vote buying allows buyers to engage in rent-seeking that diminishes overall social wealth. Finally, some commentators offer an inalienability argument against vote buying: votes belong to the community as a whole and should not be alienable by individual voters. This alienability argument may support an anti-commodification norm that causes voters to make public-regarding voting decisions. (Hasen 2000: 1325)

Two of the concerns here are consequentialist: the worry is that in a regime where vote-buying is legal, votes will be bought and sold in socially destructive ways. However, whether vote buying is destructive is a subject of serious social scientific debate; some economists think markets in votes would in fact produce greater efficiency (Buchanan and Tullock 1962; Haefele 1971; Mueller 1973; Philipson and Snyder 1996; Hasen 2000: 1332). The third concern is deontological: it holds that votes are just not the kind of thing that ought be for sale, even if it turned out that vote-buying and selling did not lead to bad consequences.

Many people think vote selling is wrong because it would lead to bad or corrupt voting. But, if that is the problem, then perhaps the permissibility of vote buying and selling should be assessed on a case-by-case basis. Perhaps the rightness or wrongness of individual acts of vote buying and selling depends entirely on how the vote seller votes (J. Brennan 2011a: 135–160; Brennan and Jaworski 2015: 183–194). Suppose I pay a person to vote in a good way. For instance, suppose I pay indifferent people to vote on behalf of women’s rights, or for the Correct Theory of Justice, whatever that might be. Or, suppose I think turnout is too low, and so I pay a well-informed person to vote her conscience. It is unclear why we should conclude in either case that I have done something wrong, rather than conclude that I have done everyone a small public service.

Certain objections to vote buying and selling appear to prove too much; these objections lead to conclusions that the objectors are not willing to support. For instance, one common argument against voting selling is that paying a person to vote imposes an externality on third parties. However, so does persuading others to vote or to vote in certain ways (Freiman 2014: 762). If paying you to vote for X is wrong because it imposes a third party cost, then for the sake of consistency, I should also conclude that persuading you to vote for X , say, on the basis of a good argument, is equally problematic.

As another example, some object to voting markets on the grounds that votes should be for the common good, rather than for narrow self-interest (Satz 2010: 103; Sandel 2012: 10). Others say that voting should “be an act undertaken only after collectively deliberating about what it is in the common good” (Satz 2010: 103). Some claim that vote markets should be illegal for this reason. Perhaps it’s permissible to forbid vote selling because commodified votes are likely to be cast against the common good. However, if that is sufficient reason to forbid markets in votes, then it is unclear why we should not, e.g., forbid highly ignorant, irrational, or selfish voters from voting, as their votes are also unusually likely to undermine the common good (Freiman 2014: 771–772). Further these arguments appear to leave open that a person could permissibly sell her vote, provided she does so after deliberating and provided she votes for the common good. It might be that if vote selling were legal, most or even all vote sellers would vote in destructive ways, but that does not show that vote selling is inherently wrong.

One pressing issue, though, is whether vote buying is compatible with the secret ballot (Maloberti 2018). Regardless of whether vote buying is enforced through legal means (such as through enforceable contracts) or social means (such as through the reputation mechanism in eBay or through simply social disapproval), to enforce vote buying seems to require that voters in some way actively prove they voted in various ways. But, if so, then this will partly eliminate the secret ballot and possibly lead to increased clientelism, in which politicians make targeted promises to particular bands of voters rather than serve the common good (Maloberti 2018).

Not all objections to vote-buying have this consequentialist flavor. Some argue that vote buying is wrong for deontological grounds, for instance, on the grounds that vote buying in some way is incompatible with the social meaning of voting (e.g. Walzer 1984). Some view voting is an expressive act, and the meaning of that expression is socially-determined. To buy and sell votes may signal disrespect to others in light of this social meaning.

6. Who Should Be Allowed to Vote? Should Everyone Receive Equal Voting Rights?

The dominant view among political philosophers is that we ought to have some sort of representative democracy, and that each adult ought to have one vote, of equal weight to every other adult’s, in any election in her jurisdiction. This view has recently come under criticism, though, both from friends and foes of democracy.

Before one even asks whether “one person, one vote” is the right policy, one needs to determine just who counts as part of the demos. Call this the boundary problem or the problem of constituting the demos (Goodin 2007: 40; Ron 2017). Democracy is the rule of the people. But one fundamental question is just who constitutes “the people”. This is no small problem. Before one can judge that a democracy is fair, or adequately responds to citizens’ interests, one needs to know who “counts” and who does not.

One might be inclined to say that everyone living under a particular government’s jurisdiction is part of the demos and is thus entitled to a vote. However, in fact, most democracies exclude children and teenagers, felons, the mentally infirm, and non-citizens living in a government’s territory from being able to vote, but at the same time allow their citizens living in foreign countries to vote (López-Guerra 2014: 1).

There are a number of competing theories here. The “all affected interests” theory (Dahl 1990a: 64) holds that anyone who is affected by a political decision or a political institution is part of the demos. The basic argument is that anyone who is affected by a political decision-making process should have some say over that process. However, this principle suffers from multiple problems. It may be incoherent or useless, as we might not know or be able to know who is affected by a decision until after the decision is made (Goodin 2007: 52). For example (taken from Goodin 2007: 53), suppose the UK votes on whether to transfer 5% of its GDP to its former African colonies. We cannot assess whether the members of the former African colonies are among the affected interests until we know what the outcome of the vote is. If the vote is yay, then they are affected; if the vote is nay, then they are not. (See Owen 2012 for a response.) Further, the “all affected interests” theory would often include non-citizens and exclude citizens. Sometimes political decisions made in one country have a significant effect on citizens of another country; sometimes political decisions made in one country have little or no effect on some of the citizens of that country.

One solution (Goodin 2007: 55) to this problem (of who counts as an affected party) is to hold that all people with possibly or potentially affected interests constitute part of the polity. This principle implies, however, that for many decisions, the demos is smaller than the nation-state, and for others, it is larger. For instance, when the United States decides whether to elect a warmongering or pacifist candidate, this affects not only Americans, but a large percentage of people worldwide.

Other major theories offered as solutions to the boundary problem face similar problems. For example, the coercion theory holds that anyone subject to coercion from a political body ought to have a say (López-Guerra 2005). But this principle might be also be seen as over-inclusive (Song 2009), as it would require that resident aliens, tourists, or even enemy combatants be granted a right to vote, as they are also subject to a state’s coercive power. Further, who will be coerced depends on the outcome of a decision. If a state decides to impose some laws, it will coerce certain people, and if the state declines to impose those laws, then it will not. If we try to overcome this by saying anyone potentially subject to a given state’s coercive power ought to have a say, then this seems to imply that almost everyone worldwide should have a say in most states’ major decisions.

The commonsense view of the demos, i.e., that the demos includes all and only adult members of a nation-state, may be hard to defend. Goodin (2007: 49) proposes that what makes citizens special is that their interests are interlinked. This may be an accidental feature of arbitrarily-decided national borders, but once these borders are in place, citizens will find that their interests tend to more linked together than with citizens of other polities. But whether this is true is also highly contingent.

The idea of “One person, one vote” is supposedly grounded on a commitment to egalitarianism. Some philosophers believe that democracy with equal voting rights is necessary to ensure that government gives equal consideration to everyone’s interests (Christiano 1996, 2008). However, it is not clear that giving every citizen an equal right to vote reliably results in decisions that give equal consideration to everyone’s interests. In many decisions, many citizens have little to nothing at stake, while other citizens have a great deal at stake. Thus, one alternative proposal is that citizens’ votes should be weighted by how much they have a stake in the decision. This preserves equality not by giving everyone an equal chance of being decisive in every decision, but by giving everyone’s interests equal weight. Otherwise, in a system of one person, one vote, issues that are deeply important to the few might continually lose out to issues of only minor interest to the many (Brighouse and Fleurbaey 2010).

There are a number of other independent arguments for this conclusion. Perhaps proportional voting enhances citizens’ autonomy, by giving them greater control over those issues in which they have greater stakes, while few would regard it as significant loss of autonomy were they to have reduced control over issues that do not concern them. Further, though the argument for this conclusion is too technical to cover here in depth (Brighouse and Fleurbaey 2010; List 2013), it may be that apportioning political power according to one’s stake in the outcome can overcome some of the well-known paradoxes of democracy, such as the Condorcet Paradox (which show that democracies might have intransitive preferences, i.e., the majority might prefer A to B, B to C, and yet also prefer C to A).

However, even if this proposal seems plausible in theory, it is unclear how a democracy might reliably instantiate this in practice. Before allowing a vote, a democratic polity would need to determine to what extent different citizens have a stake in the decision, and then somehow weight their votes accordingly. In real life, special-interests groups and others would likely try to use vote weighting for their own ends. Citizens might regard unequal voting rights as evidence of corruption or electoral manipulation (Christiano 2008: 34–45).

Early defenders of democracy were concerned to show democracy is superior to aristocracy, monarchy, or oligarchy. However, in recent years, epistocracy has emerged as a major contender to democracy (Estlund 2003, 2007; Landemore 2012). A system is said to be epistocratic to the extent that the system formally allocates political power on the basis of knowledge or political competence. For instance, an epistocracy might give university-educated citizens additional votes (Mill 1861), exclude citizens from voting unless they can pass a voter qualification exam, weigh votes by each voter’s degree of political knowledge while correcting for the influence of demographic factors, or create panels of experts who have the right to veto democratic legislation (Caplan 2007; J. Brennan 2011b; López-Guerra 2014; Mulligan 2015).

Arguments for epistocracy generally center on concerns about democratic incompetence. Epistocrats hold that democracy imbues citizens with the right to vote in a promiscuous way. Ample empirical research has shown that the mean, median, and modal levels of basic political knowledge (let alone social scientific knowledge) among citizens is extremely low (Somin 2013; Caplan 2007; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996). Further, political knowledge makes a significant difference in how citizens vote and what policies they support (Althaus 1998, 2003; Caplan 2007; Gilens 2012). Epistocrats believe that restricting or weighting votes would protect against some of the downsides of democratic incompetence.

One argument for epistocracy is that the legitimacy of political decisions depends upon them being made competently and in good faith. Consider, as an analogy: In a criminal trial, the jury’s decision is high stakes; their decision can remove a person’s rights or greatly harm their life, liberty, welfare, or property. If a jury made its decision out of ignorance, malice, whimsy, or on the basis of irrational and biased thought processes, we arguably should not and probably would not regard the jury’s decision as authoritative or legitimate. Instead, we think the criminal has a right to a trial conducted by competent people in good faith. In many respects, electoral decisions are similar to jury decisions: they also are high stakes, and can result in innocent people losing their lives, liberty, welfare, or property. If the legitimacy and authority of a jury decision depends upon the jury making a competent decision in good faith, then perhaps so should the legitimacy and authority of most other governmental decisions, including the decisions that electorates and their representatives make. Now, suppose, in light of widespread voter ignorance and irrationality, it turns out that democratic electorates tend to make incompetent decisions. If so, then this seems to provide at least presumptive grounds for favoring epistocracy over democracy (J. Brennan 2011b).

Some dispute whether epistocracy would in fact perform better than democracy, even in principle. Epistocracy generally attempts to generate better political outcomes by in some way raising the average reliability of political decision-makers. Political scientists Lu Hong and Scott Page (2004) adduced a mathematical theorem showing that under the right conditions, cognitive diversity among the participants in a collective decision more strongly contributes to the group making a smart decision than does increasing the individual participants’ reliability. On the Hong-Page theorem, it is possible that having a large number of diverse but unreliable decision-makers in a collective decision will outperform having a smaller number of less diverse but more reliable decision-makers. There is some debate over whether the Hong-Page theorem has any mathematical substance (Thompson 2014 claims it does not), whether real-world political decisions meet the conditions of the theorem, and if so, to what extent that justifies universal suffrage, or merely shows that having widespread but restricted suffrage is superior to having highly restricted suffrage (Landemore 2012; Somin 2013: 113–5).

Relatedly, Condorcet’s Jury Theorem holds that under the right conditions, provided the average voter is reliable, as more and more voters are added to a collective decision, the probability that the democracy will make the right choice approaches 1 (List and Goodin 2001). However, assuming the theorem applies to real-life democratic decisions, whether the theorem supports or condemns democracy depends on how reliable voters are. If voters do systematically worse than chance (e.g., Althaus 2003; Caplan 2007), then the theorem instead implies that large democracies almost always make the wrong choice.

One worry about certain forms of epistocracy, such as a system in which voters must earn the right to vote by passing an examination, is that such systems might make decisions that are biased toward members of certain demographic groups. After all, political knowledge is not evenly dispersed among all demographic groups. (At the very least, the kinds of knowledge political scientists have been studying are not evenly distributed. Whether other kinds of knowledge are better distributed is an open question.) On average, in the United States, on measures of basic political knowledge, whites know more than blacks, people in the Northeast know more than people in the South, men know more than women, middle-aged people know more than the young or old, and high-income people know more than the poor (Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996: 137–177). If such a voter examination system were implemented, the resulting electorate would be whiter, maler, richer, more middle-aged, and better employed than the population at large. Democrats might reasonably worry that for this very reason an epistocracy would not take the interests of non-whites, women, the poor, or the unemployed into proper consideration.

However, at least one form of epistocracy may be able to avoid this objection. Consider, for instance, the “enfranchisement lottery”:

The enfranchisement lottery consists of two devices. First, there would be a sortition to disenfranchise the vast majority of the population. Prior to every election, all but a random sample of the public would be excluded. I call this device the exclusionary sortition because it merely tells us who will not be entitled to vote in a given contest. Indeed, those who survive the sortition (the pre-voters) would not be automatically enfranchised. Like everyone in the larger group from which they are drawn, pre-voters would be assumed to be insufficiently competent to vote. This is where the second device comes in. To finally become enfranchised and vote, pre-voters would gather in relatively small groups to participate in a competence-building process carefully designed to optimize their knowledge about the alternatives on the ballot. (López-Guerra 2014: 4; cf. Ackerman and Fishkin 2005)

Under this scheme, no one has any presumptive right to vote. Instead, everyone has, by default, equal eligibility to be selected to become a voter. Before the enfranchisement lottery takes place, candidates would proceed with their campaigns as they do in democracy. However, they campaign without knowing which citizens in particular will eventually acquire the right to vote. Immediately before the election, a random but representative subset of citizens is then selected by lottery. These citizens are not automatically granted the right to vote. Instead, the chosen citizens merely acquire permission to earn the right to vote. To earn this right, they must then participate in some sort of competence-building exercise, such as studying party platforms or meeting in a deliberative forum with one another. In practice this system might suffer corruption or abuse, but, epistocrats respond, so does democracy in practice. For epistocrats, the question is which system works better, i.e., produces the best or most substantively just outcomes, all things considered.

One important deontological objection to epistocracy is that it may be incompatible with public reason liberalism (Estlund 2007). Public reason liberals hold that distribution of coercive political power is legitimate and authoritative only if all reasonable people subject to that power have strong enough grounds to endorse a justification for that power (Vallier and D’Agostino 2013). By definition, epistocracy imbues some citizens with greater power than others on the grounds that these citizens have greater social scientific knowledge. However, the objection goes, reasonable people could disagree about just what counts as expertise and just who the experts are. If reasonable people disagree about what counts as expertise and who the experts are, then epistocracy distributes political power on terms not all reasonable people have conclusive grounds to endorse. Epistocracy thus distributes political power on terms not all reasonable people have conclusive grounds to endorse. (See, however, Mulligan 2015.)

Achen, C. and Bartels, L., 2016, Democracy for Realists , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ackerman, B. and Fishkin, J.S., 2005, Deliberation Day , New Haven: Yale University Press.
Althaus, S., 1998, “Information Effects in Collective Preferences”, American Political Science Review , 92: 545–58.
–––, 2003, Collective Preferences in Democratic Politics , New York: Cambridge University Press.
Bartels, L., 2010, Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Beerbohm, E., 2012, In Our Name: The Ethics of Democracy , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Birch, S., 2009, Full Participation: A Comparative Study of Compulsory Voting , Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Brennan, G. and Lomasky, L., 1993, Democracy and Decision: The Pure Theory of Electoral Preference , New York: Cambridge University Press.
Brennan, J., 2009, “Polluting the Polls: When Citizens Should Not Vote”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 87: 535–549.
–––, 2011a, The Ethics of Voting , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
–––, 2011b, “The Right to a Competent Electorate”, Philosophical Quarterly , 61: 700–724.
–––, 2013, “Epistocracy within Public Reason”, in Democracy in the Twenty First Century: Problems and Prospects , A. Cudd and S. Scholz (ed.), Berlin: Springer.
Brennan, J. and L. Hill, 2014, Compulsory Voting: For and Against , New York: Cambridge University Press.
Brennan, J. and P.M. Jaworski, 2015, Markets without Limits , New York: Routledge Press.
Brighouse, H. and M. Fleurbaey, 2010, “Democracy and Proportionality”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 18: 137–155.
Buchanan, J. and G. Tullock, 1962, The Calculus of Consent , Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Campbell, A., G. Gurin and W.E. Miller, 1954, The Voter Decides , Evanston, Ill: Row, Peterson, and Co.
Caplan, B., 2007, The Myth of the Rational Voter , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Christiano, T., 1996, The Rule of the Many: Fundamental Issues in Democratic Theory , Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
–––, 2006, “Democracy”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2006 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2006/entries/democracy/ >.
–––, 2008, The Constitution of Authority , New York: Oxford University Press.
Dahl, R.A., 1990a, After the Revolution? Authority in a Good Society , New Haven: Yale University Press.
–––, 1990b, “The Myth of the Presidential Mandate”, Political Science Quarterly , 105: 355–72.
Delli Carpini, M.X. and S. Keeter, 1996, What Americans Know about Politics and Why It Matters , New Haven: Yale University Press.
Dovi, S., 2007, The Good Representative , New York: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing.
Downs, A., 1957, An Economic Theory of Democracy , New York: Harper and Row.
Edlin, A., A. Gelman, and N. Kaplan, 2007, “Voting as a Rational Choice: Why and How People Vote to Improve the Well-Being of Others”, Rationality and Society , 19: 219–314.
Engelen B., 2007, “Why Compulsory Voting Can Enhance Democracy”, Acta Analytica , 42: 23–39.
Estlund, D., 2003, “Why Not Epistocracy”, in Desire, Identity and Existence. Essays in Honor of T.M. Penner , ed. Naomi Reshotko, pp. 53–69, New York: Academic Printing & Publishing.
–––, 2007, Democratic Authority , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Evans, J., 2003, Voters and Voting , Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Freiman, C., 2014, “Vote Markets”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy , 92: 759–774.
–––, 2020. Why It’s OK to Ignore Politics , New York: Routledge Press.
Galston, W., 2011, “Telling Americans to Vote, or Else”, New York Times , 6 November 2011, SR9.
Gilens, M., 2012, Affluence and Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Goldman, A., 1999, “Why Citizens Should Vote: A Causal Responsibility Approach”, Social Philosophy and Policy , 16: 201–217.
Goodin, R.E., 2007, “Enfranchising All Affected Interests, and Its Alternatives”, Philosophy and Public Affairs , 35: 40–68.
Gosseries, A., 2005, “Publicity”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2005 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2005/entries/publicity/ >.
Guerrero, A.A., 2010, “The Paradox of Voting and the Ethics of Political Representation”, Philosophy and Public Affairs , 38: 272–306.
Haefele, E., 1971, “A Utility Theory of Representative Government”, American Economic Review , 61: 350–65.
Haidt, J., 2012, The Righteous Mind , New York: Pantheon.
Hasen, R.L., 2000, “Vote Buying”, California Law Review , 88: 1323–1371
Highton, B. and R.E. Wolfinger, 2001, “The Political Implications of Higher Turnout”, British Journal of Political Science , 31(1): 179–223.
Hill, L., 2002, “On the Reasonableness of Compelling Citizens to Vote: The Australian Case”, Political Studies , 50: 80–101.
–––, 2006, “Low Voter Turnout in the United States: Is Compulsory Voting a Viable Solution?”, Journal of Theoretical Politics , 18: 207–32.
Hong, L., and Page, S., 2004, “Groups of Diverse Problem Solvers Can Outperform Groups of High-Ability Problem Solvers”, Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences of the United States of America , 101: 16385–9.
Kinder, D.R., and Kalmoe, N.P., 2017, Neither Liberal nor Conservative: Ideological Innocent in the American Public , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Landemore, H., 2012, Democratic Reason , Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Leighley, J.E. and J. Nagler, 1992, “Individual and Systematic Influences on Voter Turnout: 1984”, Journal of Politics , 54: 718–40.
Lijphart, A., 1997, “Unequal Participation: Democracy’s Unresolved Dilemma”, American Political Science Review , 91: 1–14.
List, C., 2013, “Social Choice Theory”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2013/entries/social-choice/ >.
List, C. and R. Goodin, 2001, “Epistemic Democracy: Generalizing the Condorcet Jury Theorem”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 9: 277–306.
Lodge, M. and C. Taber, 2013, The Rationalizing Voter , New York: Cambridge University Press.
Lomasky, L. and G. Brennan, 2000, “Is There a Duty to Vote?”, Social Philosophy and Policy , 17: 62–82.
López-Guerra, C., 2005, “Should Expatriates Vote?”, Journal of Political Philosophy , 13(2): 216–34. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9760.2005.00221.x
–––, 2014, Democracy and Disenfranchisement , New York: Oxford University Press.
MacAskill, W., 2015, Doing Good Better , New York: Avery.
Mackie, Gerry, 2010, “Why It’s Rational to Vote”, University of California, San Diego, unpublished manuscript.
Maloberti, N., 2018, “Markets in votes: Alienability, Strict Secrecy, and Political Clientelism”, Politics, Philosophy, and Economics , 18: 192–215.
Maskivker, J., 2019, The Duty to Vote , New York: Oxford University Press.
Mason, L., 2017, Uncivil Agreement: How Politics Become Our Identity , Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mill, J.S., 1861, Considerations on Representative Government , Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1991.
Mueller, D., 1973, “Constitutional Democracy and Social Welfare”, Quarterly Journal of Economics , 87: 61–79.
–––, 2003, Public Choice III , New York: Cambridge University Press.
Mulligan, T., 2015, “On the Compatibility of Epistocracy and Public Reason”, Social Theory and Practice , 41: 458–76.
Noel, H., 2010, “Ten Things Political Scientists Know that You Don’t”, The Forum , 8(3): article 12. doi:10.2202/1540-8884.1393
Owen, D., 2012, “Constituting the Polity, Constituting the Demos: On the Place of the All Affected Interests Principle in Democratic Theory and in Resolving the Democratic Boundary Problem”, Ethics & Global Politics , 5: 129–152.
Pacuit, E., 2011, “Voting Methods”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2011 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2011/entries/voting-methods/>>.
Philipson, T. and J. Snyder, 1996, “Equilibrium and Efficiency in an Organized Vote Market”, Public Choice , 89: 245–65.
Ron, Amit. 2017, “Affected Interests and Their Institutions”, Democratic Theory , 4: 66–81.
Sandel, M., 2012, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets , New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.
Satz, D., 2010, Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale , New York: Oxford University Press.
Schwitzgebel, E. and J. Rust, 2010, “Do Ethicists and Political Philosophers Vote More Often than Other Professors?”, Review of Philosophy and Psychology , 1: 189–199.
Singh, S. P., 2015, “Compulsory Voting and the Turnout Decision Calculus”, Political Studies , 63: 548–568.
Sheehy, P., 2002, “A Duty Not to Vote”, Ratio (new series), 15: 46–57.
Somin, I., 2013, Democracy and Political Ignorance , Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Song, S., 2009, “Democracy and Noncitizen Voting Rights?”, Citizenship Studies , 13: 607–20.
Tetlock, P., 2000, “ Coping with Trade-Offs: Psychological Constraints and Political Implications”, Elements of Reason: Cognition, Choice, and the Bounds of Rationality , ed. A. Lupia, M.D. McCubbins, and S.L. Popkin, New York: Cambridge University Press
Thompson, A., 2014, “ Does Diversity Trump Ability? An Example of the Misuse of Mathematics in the Social Sciences”, Notices of the American Mathematical Society , 61: 1024–30.
Tuck, R., 2008, Free Riding , Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Vallier, K. and F. D’Agostino, 2013, “Public Justification”, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = < https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/justification-public/ >.
Walzer, M., 1984, Spheres of Justice , New York: Basic Books.
Westen, D., 2008, The Political Brain , New York: Perseus Books.
Westen, D., P.S. Blagov, K. Harenski, C. Kilts, and S Hamann, 2006, “The neural basis of motivated reasoning: An fMRI study of emotional constraints on political judgment during the U.S. Presidential election of 2004”, The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience , 18(11): 1947–1958. doi:10.1162/jocn.2006.18.11.1947

How to cite this entry . Preview the PDF version of this entry at the Friends of the SEP Society . Look up topics and thinkers related to this entry at the Internet Philosophy Ontology Project (InPhO). Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database.

American National Election Studies

Accessibility

Support SEP

Mirror sites.

View this site from another server:

Info about mirror sites

Library of Congress Catalog Data: ISSN 1095-5054

Click through the PLOS taxonomy to find articles in your field.

For more information about PLOS Subject Areas, click here .

Loading metrics

Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

Voting Intention and Choices: Are Voters Always Rational and Deliberative?

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliations Department of Psychology, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan, Research Center for Mind, Brain, and Learning, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan

Affiliation Division of Social Science, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong S.A.R., China

Affiliation Election Study Center, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan

Affiliation Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Asia University, Taichung, Taiwan

Affiliation Department of Computer Science, National Chengchi University, Taipei, Taiwan

I-Ching Lee,
Eva E. Chen,
Chia-Hung Tsai,
Nai-Shing Yen,
Arbee L. P. Chen,
Wei-Chieh Lin

Published: February 17, 2016
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148643
Reader Comments

Human rationality–the ability to behave in order to maximize the achievement of their presumed goals (i.e., their optimal choices)–is the foundation for democracy. Research evidence has suggested that voters may not make decisions after exhaustively processing relevant information; instead, our decision-making capacity may be restricted by our own biases and the environment. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which humans in a democratic society can be rational when making decisions in a serious, complex situation–voting in a local political election. We believe examining human rationality in a political election is important, because a well-functioning democracy rests largely upon the rational choices of individual voters. Previous research has shown that explicit political attitudes predict voting intention and choices (i.e., actual votes) in democratic societies, indicating that people are able to reason comprehensively when making voting decisions. Other work, though, has demonstrated that the attitudes of which we may not be aware, such as our implicit (e.g., subconscious) preferences, can predict voting choices, which may question the well-functioning democracy. In this study, we systematically examined predictors on voting intention and choices in the 2014 mayoral election in Taipei, Taiwan. Results indicate that explicit political party preferences had the largest impact on voting intention and choices. Moreover, implicit political party preferences interacted with explicit political party preferences in accounting for voting intention, and in turn predicted voting choices. Ethnic identity and perceived voting intention of significant others were found to predict voting choices, but not voting intention. In sum, to the comfort of democracy, voters appeared to engage mainly explicit, controlled processes in making their decisions; but findings on ethnic identity and perceived voting intention of significant others may suggest otherwise.

Citation: Lee I-C, Chen EE, Tsai C-H, Yen N-S, Chen ALP, Lin W-C (2016) Voting Intention and Choices: Are Voters Always Rational and Deliberative? PLoS ONE 11(2): e0148643. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148643

Editor: Koustuv Dalal, Örebro University, SWEDEN

Received: July 3, 2015; Accepted: January 10, 2016; Published: February 17, 2016

Copyright: © 2016 Lee et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and in https://drive.google.com/open?id=0Bxjyvx9UN3aOZWhBQVY3RkJFX3c .

Funding: This work was supported by MOST 103-2221-E-004 -007 -MY3 to Dr. Arbee C. P. Chen in hiring WCL to assist with the project. It was also supported by MOST 102-2420-H-004 -014 -MY3 to Dr. Lee in hiring research assistants to do literature search and for the PLOS ONE publication fee. Financial assistance (no grant numbers were given) from the the Research Center for Mind, Brain, and Learning at National Chengchi University covered expanses for IRB approval and participants' incentives.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Introduction

Throughout history, human rationality–the ability to behave in order to maximize the achievement of their presumed goals (i.e., their optimal choices [ 1 ])–has fascinated scholars studying human cognition in myriad fields (e.g., economics, sociology, psychology, political sciences). It is also a foundation of the democratic systems. That is, voting is largely considered to be a “deliberate act” [ 2 ]: The ability and capacity of individuals to vote with their preferences after deliberation, without having their voting choices (i.e., actual votes) forcibly restricted by external forces, are crucial to the well-being of any democracy [ 2 – 3 ]. In our research, we investigate human rationality in decision-making processes for situations as complicated and consequential as political elections. Understanding how voting decisions in elections may be impacted allows us to evaluate human rationality and the potency of democratic systems.

The degree to which we can make decisions rationally has long been debated. On the one hand, many economists have adopted a utilitarian concept of rationality and have argued for comprehensive rationality stance: Human decisions are made in order to maximize the net benefits of the decisions [ 4 ]. On the other hand, researchers studying human cognition have found evidence for a bounded rationality stance: The ability to make decisions is constrained by environmental restrictions and human capacities [ 4 – 6 ].

However, carefully examining the evidence for the rationality debate has revealed that there are different operational definitions for rationality. For instance, researchers may define optimization differently, depending on the fields in which they investigate rationality. Researchers may rely on mathematical rules (e.g., expected values [ 7 ]) or individuals’ subjective views (e.g., preferences in rational choices theory [ 8 ], purposes [ 9 ], consistency [ 10 ]). Although mathematical rules are a common operationalization of rationality, not every choice could be or should be defined in numerical terms.

Therefore, in this study, we define rationality as the ability to behave so that the likelihood of achieving one’s goals is maximized [ 6 , 8 ]; that is, one behaves in accordance with one’s intentions to achieve a particular goal. If environmental cues and human capacities affect one’s choices outside of one’s intentions, the evidence suggests that one’s rationality is bounded. For example, a person may consider environmental sustainability the most important issue and national security a non-issue when evaluating candidates. As a result, he intends to vote for Candidate A, whose platform includes increased protections for the environment (i.e., voting intention ). However, on voting day, he votes for Candidate B instead (i.e., voting behavior ), because the situational cues (e.g., a recent terrorist attack) have prompted his fears regarding national security; he was therefore persuaded by Candidate B’s promises to prioritize national security above all. His vote is not rational, but is bounded by his fears about national security. Thus, we consider an inconsistency between voting intention and voting behavior to be an indication of bounded rationality; consistency between voting intention and voting behavior, on the other hand, would be evidence for comprehensive rationality (e.g., if the person in the above example follows through with his intentions and votes for Candidate A). Independently, factors previously found to affect one’s voting choices (e.g., political party preference) are not necessarily indicators of comprehensive rationality or bounded rationality. If these factors successfully impact both people’s intentions and behavior, they could be considered as support for the comprehensive rationality stance on human cognition. If not, these factors could be considered as evidence for the bounded rationality stance. We aim not only to provide insight into the comprehensive rationality versus bounded rationality debate, but also to evaluate the relevancy of the two types of human rationality in an actual election.

Previous research has found two primary factors in accounting for voting behavior in Taiwan: political party preference and ethnic identity (see [ 11 ] for a review). The Taiwanese political parties can be classified into two categories. The pan-Blue political parties, dominated by the Kuomintang Party (KMT), are largely considered to be more supportive of a closer relationship with the People’s Republic of China [ 12 ]. The pan-Green parties, dominated by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), are generally thought to be more supportive of Taiwanese independence [ 12 ]. Historically, Taipei–the capital of Taiwan–has been a KMT stronghold. However, social events and controversies in the recent years have led to rising public sentiment against the KMT-led government (culminating in the 2014 Sunflower Movement, which saw mass protests in Taipei [ 13 – 14 ]). As a result, during the 2014 Taipei mayoral elections period, support for Wen-Je Ko, an independent candidate perceived to be representing pan-Green interests, grew rapidly; Ko proceeded to successfully challenge the KMT candidate, Sean Lien.

Because elections are often driven by political parties in Taiwan, we separately examined explicit and implicit political party preferences . Explicit political party preferences for either the pan-Blue or pan-Green camps have been found to be strongly related to voting intention [ 15 ] and choices [ 16 ], consistent with the comprehensive rationality stance. Explicit political party preferences have also been found to predict voters’ choices elsewhere [ 17 – 19 ]. Accordingly, our first hypothesis was that explicit political party preference should significantly predict voting intention and choices. That is, when respondents favor the DPP over the KMT, they should be likely to express an intention and actually vote for the candidate Ko, and vice versa if they favored the KMT over DPP (expressing an intention and subsequently voting for Lien).

We focused on the more general explicit political party preferences, rather than evaluations of the specific candidates, partisanship, or party identification for three reasons. First, we did not target evaluations of the specific candidates to avoid conceptual conflation with voting intention. Second, we did not target partisanship or party identification because a good proportion of Taiwanese voters (e.g., about 40%) often do not reveal their partisanship [ 20 ], especially when their parties become unpopular [ 21 ]. Third, less educated Taiwanese people tend not to consider themselves partisans [ 21 ]. If the general explicit political party preferences of voters predict both their voting intention and choices, these results support the comprehensive rationality stance.

In addition to explicit political party preference, we examined implicit political party preference. The impact of implicit political party preference on voting intention and choices is more difficult to predict. Galdi and colleagues [ 22 ] examined voting intention during an election to determine whether a U.S. military base located in Vicenza, Italy should be expanded. The explicit attitudes regarding the base expansion enlargement best predicted decided respondents’ voting intentions. However, the implicit attitudes regarding the base expansion enlargement best predicted the voting intentions of respondents who stated that they were undecided on the issue. Conversely, when examining voting intention and choices in the 2006 Italian national elections, Roccato and Zogmaister [ 23 ] found that although explicit voting intention was the most important predictor for voting choices, respondents’ explicit and implicit political party preferences had separate influences. Specifically, the more respondents favored their preferred political party, explicitly or implicitly, the more likely they intended to vote for the candidate belonging to that party. The researchers also found that when the explicit and implicit political party preferences of the respondents were inconsistent with each other, respondents took more time to make a decision.

Thus, based on the available literature, it is difficult to determine the precise role of implicit political party preference (and the degree of rationality involved) in voting intention and choices. Therefore, we explore the relationship of implicit political party preference with both voting intention and choices. If implicit political party preference can predict both voting intention and voting choices, this evidence would lend support to the comprehensive rationality stance; if implicit political party preference predicted voting choices but not voting intention, then the evidence would provide support to the bounded rationality stance.

In addition to political party preferences, the shift in public opinion before and during the election campaign period in Taipei meant that other factors were also likely to have a sizable impact on voting intention and choices. Thus, we examined two other factors: ethnic identity and the perceived voting intention of significant others . Ethnic identity (i.e., whether respondents identify as Taiwanese or Chinese) has been found to predict voting choices in Taiwanese presidential elections, in that voters who identify as Taiwanese are more supportive of a pan-Green candidate while those who identify as Chinese are more supportive of a pan-Blue candidate [ 24 ]. Because cross-strait issues should be less prominent in the Taipei mayoral election (compared to a nation-wide presidential election), we expect that if ethnic identity should have an effect, its impact would be in line with the bounded rationality stance. That is, although individuals may not deliberately consider their ethnic identity when voting, they may be more likely to vote for the candidate Ko (the DPP-leaning candidate) if they identify more strongly as Taiwanese.

The fourth and final factor we examined is the impact of people who are significant to an individual (i.e., one’s significant others). Taiwan is a society that emphasizes social relationships [ 25 – 26 ]; thus, significant others may impact respondents’ voting intention and subsequent behavior. There is evidence that discussion with other people can lead to shifts in one’s voting choices (e.g., in the U.S. presidential elections [ 3 , 27 ]). Therefore, we examined the impact of the perceived voting intention of significant others on voters’ intention and choices. If the perceived voting intention of significant others predicted both voters’ intention and subsequent choices, the results would support the comprehensive rationality stance. Conversely, if the perceived voting intention of significant others predicted only voters’ choices but not intention, the bounded rationality stance would be supported.

To summarize, we examined four predictors that are likely to be key in predicting voting intention and voting choices, focusing on the 2014 Taipei mayoral elections: (a) explicit political party preference, (b) implicit political party preference, (c) ethnic identity, and (d) the perceived voting intention of significant others. To our knowledge, our study is the first to systematically examine human rationality by investigating the impact of these four predictors on both voting intention and choices. The inclusion of all four predictors is crucial because doing so allows us to assess whether voters incorporate different types of information into their decisions. The inclusion of both voting intention and choices allows us to assess whether or not voters’ behavior reflect their intentions, which in turn allows us to evaluate the rationality of these individuals’ cognitive processes. If all four predictors were associated with voting intention and choices, the results would suggest that voters are capable of marshalling all relevant information to make their decisions before and during the voting period. However, if the predictors were associated with voter choices but not intention, it is possible that voters may experience some cognitive limitations when considering the information presented to them before they vote, thus casting doubt on our capability for comprehensive rationality.

Materials and Method

Ethic approval.

This research was supported by a grant (MOS 103-2221-E-004-007-MY3) to one of the authors (A. L. P. C.) and by financial assistance from the Research Center for Mind, Brain, and Learning, National Chengchi University. The research was approved by the Research Ethics Committee, National Taiwan University (NTU-REC No. 201402EM023). Participants provided written informed consent before they began the study.

Participants

We targeted residents from all twelve districts in Taipei, Taiwan. We advertised our study using various social media platforms (i.e., Facebook and the Bulletin Board System, platforms that are popular in Taiwan) and through personal connections. In total, 124 respondents (64 males) were recruited. Respondents were eligible voters, and 86.3% were young adults (i.e., adults younger than 40 years of age). Most of the respondents (40.3%) did not indicate any party identification; 38.7% identified with the DPP party; and 19.4% identified with the KMT party. The majority of the respondents (71.0%) had voted in the 2012 presidential election, the last major election in Taiwan.

Procedure and materials

Approximately one month before the 2014 mayoral elections in Taipei, respondents were invited by phone to complete a survey and an implicit association test (IAT) at a public university in Taipei. The survey (see items in Table 1 ) asked participants to answer questions on their party identification, explicit political party preference, ethnic identity, and voting intention. Participants also had to report the perceived voting intention for their significant others. To provide a parallel comparison with implicit political party preference (as measured by the IAT), explicit political party preference was calculated by contrasting the respondents’ preference for the DPP over the KMT; that is, the higher the survey scores, the more the respondents preferred the DPP over the KMT. Voting intention and perceived voting intention of significant others were calculated using the same rationale. Voting intention was measured by two items, one item for their intended candidate and one item for the certainty of such a decision. Intended candidate was coded as follows: 1 for the candidate Ko, -1 for the candidate Lien, and 0 for all other candidates. The strength of voting intention was calculated by multiplying the intended choice with the degree of certainty. Similarly, the perceived voting intention of significant others was estimated by multiplying the perceived significant other’s intended candidate choice (coded the same way as for the participant’s intended candidate) with the perceived certainty of the significant other. Higher scores indicate a preference for Ko over Lien, as well as stronger certainty.

PPT PowerPoint slide
PNG larger image
TIFF original image

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148643.t001

Following the survey, respondents took a political party preferences IAT (see S1 Appendix for a detailed description of how the test was developed). The IAT tapped respondents’ implicit associations of valence with the main political parties in Taiwan, the KMT and DPP, by measuring how positive and negative words may reduce or prolong the reaction time of stimuli representing either party. We calculated the resulting D-scores so that higher D-scores indicated a stronger preference for the DPP (i.e., DPP = good). The order of the blocks (i.e., Blocks 3 and 5; see S1 Appendix ) within the IAT did not affect respondents’ implicit political party preference scores ( p = .88).

One week after the conclusion of the Taipei mayoral elections, respondents were contacted again by phone to report their actual voting choice. Responses were coded the same way as in intended candidate: 1 for the candidate Ko, -1 for the candidate Lien, and 0 for all other candidates.

Descriptive analysis

On average, respondents explicitly stated that they favored the DPP over the KMT ( M D = 1.28, SD = 4.02), t (122) = 3.52, p = .001, but they showed no implicit preference for either party ( M = 0.01, p = .82). The explicit political party preferences were consistent with respondents’ party identity. Participants who identified with the DPP showed the most explicit preference toward the DPP over KMT ( M = 4.38, on a scale of -10 to 10). By contrast, participants who identified with the KMT and participants who did not identify with a party showed significantly less explicit preference for the DPP ( M = -4.08 and M = 0.88, respectively), all pairwise contrasts at p s < .01. Furthermore, implicit political party preferences were also consistent with respondents’ party identity, with the DPP identifiers showing the strongest implicit preference toward the DPP ( M = 0.29), no-party identifiers showing little preference for either party ( M = 0.02), and KMT identifiers showing a preference for the KMT ( M = -0.58), all pairwise contrasts at p s < .01.

The majority of the respondents identified as Taiwanese only (72.7%). On a scale of 1 (Chinese only) to 3 (Taiwanese only), respondents scored M = 2.60, SD = 0.67. Most of the respondents (83.6%) indicated that they would vote in the mayoral election, and 69.4% indicated that they would vote for the candidate Ko. Participants were very certain of their decision before the election (on a scale from 0 to10, with 0 indicating strong uncertainty and 10 indicating strong certainty; M = 8.22, SD = 2.69). Over half (56.4%) also reported that their significant other would vote for the candidate Ko, and that these significant others were also very certain of their choices ( M = 8.65, SD = 2.25).

To examine the degree to which the four predictors–explicit political party preference, implicit political party preference, ethnic identity, and perceived voting intention of significant others–can predict voting intention and choices, we first ran hierarchical regression analyses on voting intention, as well as on choices, respectively. In the first step, we entered respondent gender and education level (with a STEPWISE method). In the second step, we entered the explicit and implicit political party preference scores (with an ENTER method). Finally, we entered ethnic identity, perceived voting intention of significant others, as well as the interaction of the explicit and implicit political party preferences (with a STEPWISE method).

Analyses for voting intention

Respondents’ explicit political party preferences predicted their voting intention, standardized B = 0.49, p < .001, suggesting that the more respondents favored the DPP over the KMT, the more likely they expressed an intention to vote for the candidate Ko. There was also a significant interaction between explicit and the implicit political party preferences, B = -0.22, p = .001. As seen in Fig 1 , there was a steeper slope of respondents with low implicit DPP preference compared to those with high implicit DPP preference. Respondents who had consistently both low explicit and implicit DPP preferences were least likely to express an intention to vote for the candidate Ko. Respondents who had high explicit DPP preference were most likely to express an intention to vote for the candidate Ko, regardless of their implicit DPP preferences. The perceived voting intention of significant others, B = 0.15, p = .047, and implicit DPP preference, B = 0.13, p = .07, also predicted respondents’ intention to vote. The more respondents perceived significant others’ intent to vote for the candidate Ko, as well as the more respondents preferred DPP implicitly, the more likely (marginally for implicit preference) they expressed an intention to vote for candidate Ko. No other variables were significant, and the model accounted for 54.8% of the variance.

Solid diamond: low implicit DPP preference. Solid square: high implicit DPP preference.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148643.g001

Analyses for voting choice

The explicit political party preference of respondents, B = 0.22, p = .028, and an interaction between explicit and implicit political party preferences, B = -0.21, p = .01, significantly predicted their voting choices (see Fig 2 ), replicating the findings in the analyses for voting intention. Ethnic identity, B = 0.23, p = .007, and the perceived voting intention of significant others, B = 0.19, p = .031, were also found to be robust predictors. The interpretations of the effects of explicit political party preferences, the interaction between explicit and implicit political party preferences, and the perceived voting intention of significant others on voting choices were identical to those on voting intention. Respondents who identified themselves as Taiwanese were more likely to vote for the candidate Ko compared to respondents who identified themselves as Chinese. No other variables were significant, and the model accounted for 39.0% of the variance.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148643.g002

Path model analysis: putting pieces together

We conducted a path model analysis with a bootstrapping method (see Fig 3 and the correlation matrix in S2 Appendix ). Based on the findings in the regression analyses, explicit political party preferences, implicit political party preferences, the interactions between the two types of party preferences, and the perceived voting intention of significant others were proposed to predict voting intention and choices, respectively. Ethnic identity was proposed to predict voting choices. Because ethnic identity and different levels of political party preferences were often intertwined in political discourse, the error terms of ethnic identity, explicit political party preferences, implicit political party preferences and the interaction term of the two kinds of political party preferences were covaried. Lastly, respondents’ explicit political party preference may affect with whom they would like to be associated. Thus, a path from explicit political party preference to the perceived voting intention of significant others was drawn. When fitting the model with the participants’ responses, the model has a good fit, χ 2 (7) = 8.82, p = .27; CFI = 0.99, RMSEA = 0.046. The paths are listed in Table 2 .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148643.g003

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148643.t002

Consistent with the findings from hierarchical regression modeling, the explicit political party preferences of the respondents and the interaction between explicit and implicit political party preferences predicted voting intention. Once voting intention was taken into account, respondents’ explicit political party preference and the interaction term were no longer significant predictors for voting choices. Thus, voting intention served as the complete mediator between (a) the explicit political party preferences to voting choices, Sobel Z = 3.67, p = .0002, and (b) between the interaction of implicit and explicit political party preferences to voting choices, Sobel Z = -2.43, p = .015. Lastly, the associations of ethnic identity and perceived voting intention of significant others on voting choices remained significant after controlling for voting intention.

Supplementary analysis

We tested whether an interaction between explicit and implicit political party preferences may account for reticent or undecided voters, as was reported in Roccato and Zogmaister [ 23 ]. Following Roccato and Zogmaister’s conceptualization of reticent and undecided voters, participants who refused or were unable to indicate their intended candidate (coded 1 as reticent or undecided) were separated from those who indicated their intended candidate (coded 0). Indeed, a logistic regression model showed that when participants had lower explicit political party preference for the DPP, B = -1.23, p = .001, lower implicit political party preference for the DPP, B = -0.70, p = .037, and when their explicit and implicit political party preferences were inconsistent with one another, B = -1.15, p = .007, they were less likely to have made a voting decision when questioned prior to the elections (see Fig 4 ).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148643.g004

General Discussion

The present study weighs evidence for the comprehensive rationality stance and the bounded rationality stance on human cognition through an examination of voting intention and choices in the 2014 Taipei mayoral elections. In this regional election, we found evidence for comprehensive rationality: Taiwanese voters were largely rational and deliberative, with explicit political party preferences serving as the best predictor of their voting intentions, which in turn served as the best predictor of their voting choices. In addition, voting intention mediated the effects of explicit and implicit political party preferences on voting choices. Our evidence suggests that although implicit attitudes are often treated as a challenge to human rationality [ 5 ], this may not be the case [ 19 ]. We replicated Roccato and Zogmaister’s findings [ 23 ], demonstrating that when participants’ explicit and implicit political preferences did not ally, participants were less likely to express their intended candidates. In other words, taken together with the results from Roccato and Zogmaister [ 23 ], the impact of implicit preferences on voting appears to be present across different cultures, which may signal to individuals that they need to process information more cautiously when deciding for whom to vote.

However, we also found evidence to support bounded rationality. The voting choices of our participants were affected by their ethnic identity, even though it was not directly associated with the voting intentions of the participants. There are several plausible explanations for these findings. First, voters may not be aware of the impact of ethnic identity on their decisions. Alternatively, political candidates (e.g., Ko, Lien) may have exerted their efforts in the final days prior to the day of the election to sway the decisions of participants, appealing indirectly to voters’ ethnic identity through their campaigns. Finally, participants may have actively denied the possibility of ethnic identity exerting an influence when reporting on their voting intention, because they found it irrelevant to the mayoral election; but when they actually voted, they were unable to resist the impact of their ethnic identity.

Given that an individual’s social network is often composed of social ingroup members (e.g., those who belong to the same ethnicity), it is perhaps unsurprising that ethnic identity has been found to predict political activities, such as voting preference among Latino populations in the U.S. [ 28 – 29 ] and political involvement among immigrants in Germany [ 30 ]. Ethnic identity has often been treated as a group marker in which voters opt for candidates who are members of the same ethnic group. Graves and Lee [ 28 ] delineated a theory of ethnic voting, stating that ethnicity may affect voters’ partisanship and candidate evaluation, which in turn affects their voting preferences. That is, voters may favor a political party and candidates endorsed by their ethnic members (e.g., the Latino population typically supports the Democratic Party and its candidates in the U.S.). Voters may evaluate candidates from their ethnic group more favorably than those from different ethnic groups, perceiving these candidates to be more supportive of issues related to their ethnic group (e.g., Latino political candidates may have a more lenient view on immigration).

Additionally, ethnic identity may be viewed as a politicized collective identity [ 31 ]. That is, in a society where social power is divided along ethnic lines, members of subordinate ethnic groups may collectively blame an outgroup (or outgroups) for their groups’ predicament. As a result, these group members may engage in political activities to enact change. Our findings suggest that the impact of ethnic identity may be more in line with bounded rationality, as its effects were not predicted by one’s voting intention prior to the election. Thus, it is plausible that individuals vote for a candidate who shares the same ethnic (e.g., Taiwanese) identity without consciously deciding to do so. If individuals vote in blind support of their ethnic ingroup or in opposition of ethnic outgroups, their decisions will not involve substantial systematic processing, potentially undermining the principles and effectiveness of the democratic system.

Lastly, according to the path model, the voting choices of our participants were affected by the perceived voting intention of their significant others, but it was not associated with voting intention after all other variables were simultaneously controlled. The finding suggests that the association between voting intention and perceived voting intention of significant others may be pseudo. Previous research has shown that significant others may affect one’s political behavior, such as voter turnout [ 32 – 36 ], voting consistency [ 37 ], and voting choices [ 35 , 38 ]. The effects of significant others are often conceptualized as a rational act. Significant others may enforce a participation norm so people are more likely to vote [ 32 , 36 ]. Through discussion, people may gain political information and knowledge from their significant others and may be more likely to vote as a result [ 34 , 36 ]. Previous research has also shown that when people are in a social network that favors their preferred candidates, they are more likely to vote for them [ 35 – 36 ]. Schmitt-Beck [ 38 ] also found that significant others may serve as a filter to reinforce or block media information on the candidates. Thus, it appears that voting is not an individual choice but is embedded in one’s social network. However, in our research, the evidence of perceived significant other’s voting intention may be more in line with bounded rationality, as its effects on voting choices were not mediated by one’s voting intention prior to the election. Our findings suggest that there are ways that significant others may affect us that have not been recognized before. More research investigating the impact of significant others beyond individuals’ awareness will be needed to further understand voters’ behavior.

In summary, although the explicit and implicit political preferences of individuals do exert a powerful influence on their voting intention and behavior, other factors–the ethnic identity and the perceived voting intention of their significant others–play important roles as well. There is a need to explore the influence of social groups and significant others, especially in different types of political systems. Future studies should further examine the degree to which relatively sensitive issues (e.g., ethnic identity) and mainstream cultural values (e.g., the extent of other people’s influence in collectivistic societies and in individualistic societies, such as Taiwan and the U.S. respectively) affect the results of an election. Overall, our findings indicate that although the effectiveness of a democracy should rely on the rational and careful decisions of individual voters, actual democratic societies are imperfect systems, shaped by the issues faced by various social groups within the system and by the mutual impact their citizens have on one another. When looking towards the future of democracy, both in Chinese societies and beyond, we must acknowledge the impact of these factors and incorporate our understanding into the way we educate and motivate the citizens who form the fabric of democratic societies across the world.

Supporting Information

S1 appendix. the development of the political party preferences implicit association test (iat)..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148643.s001

S2 Appendix. The correlation matrix of the variables in the path model (n = 124) a .

a missing data were estimated by interpolation method. b standardized scores in the correlations and raw scores in the means and standard deviations. **: p < .001, + : p < .08.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0148643.s002

Author Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: ICL EEC CHT NSY ALPC. Performed the experiments: WCL. Analyzed the data: ICL WCL. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: ICL CHT NSY ALPC. Wrote the paper: ICL EEC CHT NSY.

1. Tsebelis G. Nested games: Rational choice in comparative politics. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press; 1990
View Article
PubMed/NCBI
Google Scholar
6. Simon H. Administrative behav. 4th ed. New York: Free Press; 1997.
9. Lindenberg S. The method of decreasing abstraction. In: Coleman J. S., & Fararo T. J., editors. Rational choice theory: Advocacy and critique. London: SAGE; 1992. p. 3–20.
11. Achen CH, Wang TY. (in press). The Taiwan voter: An introduction. In: Achen CH, & Wang TY, editors. The Taiwan voter. Taipei, Taiwan: The ECP.
13. Li L. Activists, gov't must cut through sound and fury in protest. China Post. 20 Mar 2014, Available: http://www.chinapost.com.tw/taiwan/analysis/2014/03/20/403276/Activists-gov't.htm . Accessed 4 June 2015
14. Wang C. (2014). Opposition, groups protest trade pact. Taipei Times. 19 Mar 2014, Available: http://www.taipeitimes.com/ . Accessed 3 June 2015
16. Tsai CH. Party voting in comparative perspective: The United States, Taiwan, and Japan. Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. 2003.
17. Bartel LM. The study of electoral behavior. In: Leighley J-E, editor. The Oxford handbook of American elections and political behavior. New York: Oxford University Press; 2010. p. 239–261. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199235476.003.0014
18. Campbell A, Converse PE, Miller W, Stokes D. The American voter. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; 1960.
20. The Election Study Center of National Chengchi University. Changes in the party identification of Taiwanese as tracked in surveys by the Election Study Center, NCCU; 2014. Database: figshare. Available: http://esc.nccu.edu.tw/course/news.php?Sn=165
25. Hofstede G. Masculinity and femininity: The taboo dimension of national cultures. London, United Kingdom: Sage Publications; 1998.
26. Hofstede G. Geert HofstedeTM cultural dimensions. Available: http://www.geert-hofstede.com/ . Accessed 18 July 2008.

Student Opportunities

About Hoover

Located on the campus of Stanford University and in Washington, DC, the Hoover Institution is the nation’s preeminent research center dedicated to generating policy ideas that promote economic prosperity, national security, and democratic governance.

The Hoover Story
Hoover Timeline & History
Mission Statement
Vision of the Institution Today
Key Focus Areas
About our Fellows
Research Programs
Annual Reports
Hoover in DC
Fellowship Opportunities
Visit Hoover
David and Joan Traitel Building & Rental Information
Newsletter Subscriptions
Connect With Us

Hoover scholars form the Institution’s core and create breakthrough ideas aligned with our mission and ideals. What sets Hoover apart from all other policy organizations is its status as a center of scholarly excellence, its locus as a forum of scholarly discussion of public policy, and its ability to bring the conclusions of this scholarship to a public audience.

Russell A. Berman
Robert Service
Arun Majumdar
H.R. McMaster
Justin Grimmer
China's Global Sharp Power Project
Economic Policy Group
History Working Group
Hoover Education Success Initiative
National Security Task Force
National Security, Technology & Law Working Group
Middle East and the Islamic World Working Group
Military History/Contemporary Conflict Working Group
Renewing Indigenous Economies Project
State & Local Governance
Strengthening US-India Relations
Technology, Economics, and Governance Working Group
Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region

Books by Hoover Fellows

Economics Working Papers

Hoover Education Success Initiative | The Papers

Hoover Fellows Program
National Fellows Program
Student Fellowship Program
Veteran Fellowship Program
Congressional Fellowship Program
Media Fellowship Program
Silas Palmer Fellowship
Economic Fellowship Program

Throughout our over one-hundred-year history, our work has directly led to policies that have produced greater freedom, democracy, and opportunity in the United States and the world.

Determining America’s Role in the World
Answering Challenges to Advanced Economies
Empowering State and Local Governance
Revitalizing History
Confronting and Competing with China
Revitalizing American Institutions
Reforming K-12 Education
Understanding Public Opinion
Understanding the Effects of Technology on Economics and Governance
Energy & Environment
Health Care
Immigration
International Affairs
Key Countries / Regions
Law & Policy
Politics & Public Opinion
Science & Technology
Security & Defense
State & Local
Books by Fellows
Published Works by Fellows
Working Papers
Congressional Testimony
Hoover Press
PERIODICALS
The Caravan
China's Global Sharp Power
Economic Policy
History Lab
Hoover Education
Global Policy & Strategy
Middle East and the Islamic World
Military History & Contemporary Conflict
Renewing Indigenous Economies
State and Local Governance
Technology, Economics, and Governance

Hoover scholars offer analysis of current policy challenges and provide solutions on how America can advance freedom, peace, and prosperity.

China Global Sharp Power Weekly Alert
Email newsletters
Hoover Daily Report
Subscription to Email Alerts
Periodicals
California on Your Mind
Defining Ideas
Hoover Digest
Video Series
Uncommon Knowledge
Battlegrounds
GoodFellows
Hoover Events
Capital Conversations
Hoover Book Club
AUDIO PODCASTS
Matters of Policy & Politics
Economics, Applied
Free Speech Unmuted
Secrets of Statecraft
Capitalism and Freedom in the 21st Century
Libertarian
Library & Archives

Support Hoover

Learn more about joining the community of supporters and scholars working together to advance Hoover’s mission and values.

What is MyHoover?

MyHoover delivers a personalized experience at Hoover.org . In a few easy steps, create an account and receive the most recent analysis from Hoover fellows tailored to your specific policy interests.

Watch this video for an overview of MyHoover.

Log In to MyHoover

Forgot Password

Don't have an account? Sign up

Have questions? Contact us

Support the Mission of the Hoover Institution
Subscribe to the Hoover Daily Report
Follow Hoover on Social Media

Make a Gift

Your gift helps advance ideas that promote a free society.

About Hoover Institution
Meet Our Fellows
Focus Areas
Research Teams
Library & Archives

Library & archives

Events, news & press.

Ethical Standards For Election Administration

We have been privileged to work with a distinguished group of current and former election officials and experts in election administration, who collaborated over many months in producing this report, Ethical Standards for Election Administration.

Executive Summary

Elections in the United States are conducted by dedicated election officials committed to ensuring fairness, accuracy, accessibility, and security. For most election officials, ethical standards are based on personal ethical convictions, commitment to abide by state ethics laws, and dedication to follow their oath of office. While no unified set of ethical principles exists in the field, some state associations and training programs address ethics, and the National Association of Election Officials (the Election Center) maintains a set of standards for its members.

Articulating ethical principles for election officials offers numerous advantages.

It provides a shared vocabulary to communicate the moral basis for election conduct to voters.
It aids in training new officials by reinforcing the broader purpose of election administration as a profession.
It helps internalize values that can guide officials when facing external pressures or unclear election laws.

Election officials already adhere to various ethical principles and codes of conduct, such as state ethics laws and oaths of office. However, none specifically address the unique circumstances of election administration. Consequently, there is a collective obligation for election officials to define and adopt ethical principles and codes tailored to their profession.

After reviewing existing principles in public service and election administration, we recommend seven core principles for adoption by the profession:

Adhere to the law. Election officials have a duty to administer the law as written and interpreted by the relevant authorities.
Protect and defend the integrity of the election process. Election officials have a duty to ensure the integrity of elections and to safeguard against unfounded attacks on the integrity of the election process.
Promote transparency in the conduct of elections. Election officials have a duty to make election administration transparent to the public.
Treat all participants in the election process impartially. Election officials have an obligation to treat all participants in the electoral process impartially, including voters, candidates, citizens, and political committees.
Demonstrate personal integrity. Election officials have a duty to conduct themselves honestly and forthrightly in all interactions with superiors, peers, candidates, campaign officials, and the general public.
Practice the highest level of ethics and stewardship. Election officials have a duty to expend public funds carefully and foster respect among employees and volunteers.
Advance professional excellence. Election officials have a duty to stay informed about election laws and new developments in election management.

These principles should be accompanied by a corresponding set of standards of conduct that reflect realistic scenarios encountered by election officials at different levels of election administration. For instance, to implement the principle of adherence to the law, a county election director might be directed to seek legal counsel when the law is ambiguous, while a polling place officer might be directed to seek guidance from the local election office when the official is uncertain how to handle a situation at the polls. To implement the principle of practicing the highest level of ethics and stewardship, procedures could be developed in the local election office to encourage an open expression of views and “whistleblower” protections, whereas for temporary election workers, it would be important to spell out clearly how they should respond if they encountered a breach of ethical principles or law while voting was being conducted.

Proposals to enhance the ethical integrity of election administration in the United States have included ending the common practice of selecting senior election officials through elections, especially partisan ones. However, the deeply ingrained adversarial system, often tied to partisanship, is unlikely to be changed soon. Moreover, the same ethical standards apply to all election officials, regardless of how they are selected. Laws and practices, therefore, need to be established that allow election officials to provide notice of potential conflicts of interest and to recuse themselves from decisions that pose a conflict or appearance of conflict. Counterintuitively, conflicts of interest may be most evident in local jurisdictions, especially smaller ones.

Given the decentralized nature of U.S. election administration, state associations of local officials are best positioned to articulate and educate their members on ethical principles. Notably, the Election Center has integrated ethical principles into its certification program.

While ethical principles should guide the passage of state election law, their content should not be legislatively mandated. Enforcement of ethical principles is a serious matter, and organizations adopting such principles should carefully consider enforcement actions, ranging from informal correction to expulsion, always keeping due process rights in mind.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD

View the discussion thread.

Join the Hoover Institution’s community of supporters in ideas advancing freedom.

Search Menu

Sign in through your institution

Browse content in Arts and Humanities
Browse content in Archaeology
Historical Archaeology
Browse content in Architecture
History of Architecture
Browse content in Art
History of Art
Browse content in Classical Studies
Classical Literature
Religion in the Ancient World
Browse content in History
Colonialism and Imperialism
History by Period
Intellectual History
Military History
Political History
Regional and National History
Social and Cultural History
Theory, Methods, and Historiography
Browse content in Literature
Literary Studies (European)
Literary Studies (Romanticism)
Literary Studies - World
Literary Studies (19th Century)
Literary Studies (African American Literature)
Literary Studies (Early and Medieval)
Literary Studies (Poetry and Poets)
Literary Studies (Women's Writing)
Literary Theory and Cultural Studies
Mythology and Folklore
Shakespeare Studies and Criticism
Media Studies
Browse content in Music
Musical Structures, Styles, and Techniques
Musicology and Music History
Browse content in Philosophy
Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art
History of Western Philosophy
Metaphysics
Moral Philosophy
Philosophy of Science
Philosophy of Religion
Philosophy of Language
Social and Political Philosophy
Browse content in Religion
Biblical Studies
Christianity
History of Religion
Judaism and Jewish Studies
Religious Studies
Society and Culture
Browse content in Law
Company and Commercial Law
Comparative Law
Constitutional and Administrative Law
Criminal Law
History of Law
Browse content in Science and Mathematics
Browse content in Biological Sciences
Aquatic Biology
Biochemistry
Ecology and Conservation
Evolutionary Biology
Genetics and Genomics
Molecular and Cell Biology
Zoology and Animal Sciences
Browse content in Computer Science
Programming Languages
Environmental Science
History of Science and Technology
Browse content in Mathematics
Applied Mathematics
History of Mathematics
Mathematical Education
Mathematical Finance
Mathematical Analysis
Numerical and Computational Mathematics
Probability and Statistics
Pure Mathematics
Browse content in Neuroscience
Cognition and Behavioural Neuroscience
Development of the Nervous System
Browse content in Physics
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Biological and Medical Physics
Computational Physics
Condensed Matter Physics
History of Physics
Mathematical and Statistical Physics
Browse content in Psychology
Cognitive Neuroscience
Social Psychology
Browse content in Social Sciences
Browse content in Anthropology
Anthropology of Religion
Regional Anthropology
Social and Cultural Anthropology
Browse content in Business and Management
Business History
Industry Studies
International Business
Knowledge Management
Public and Nonprofit Management
Criminology and Criminal Justice
Browse content in Economics
Asian Economics
Behavioural Economics and Neuroeconomics
Econometrics and Mathematical Economics
Economic History
Economic Development and Growth
Financial Markets
Financial Institutions and Services
History of Economic Thought
International Economics
Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics
Microeconomics
Browse content in Education
Higher and Further Education
Browse content in Politics
Asian Politics
Comparative Politics
Conflict Politics
Environmental Politics
International Relations
Political Sociology
Political Theory
Political Economy
Public Policy
Security Studies
UK Politics
US Politics
Browse content in Regional and Area Studies
Middle Eastern Studies
Native American Studies
Browse content in Social Work
Social Work and Crime and Justice
Browse content in Sociology
Comparative and Historical Sociology
Economic Sociology
Gender and Sexuality
Health, Illness, and Medicine
Migration Studies
Occupations, Professions, and Work
Population and Demography
Race and Ethnicity
Social Theory
Social Movements and Social Change
Social Research and Statistics
Social Stratification, Inequality, and Mobility
Sociology of Religion
Sociology of Education
Urban and Rural Studies
Reviews and Awards
Journals on Oxford Academic
Books on Oxford Academic

< Previous
Next chapter >

Introduction Voting as an Ethical Issue

Published: April 2012
Cite Icon Cite
Permissions Icon Permissions

This introductory chapter provides an overview of voting ethics. Voting is the principal way that citizens influence the quality of government. As such, individual voters have moral obligations concerning how they vote. Indeed, how individuals vote can help or harm people. Electoral outcomes can lead to a bad government, which can exploit the minority for the benefit of the majority. This book argues that citizens must vote well or abstain instead. Voters ought to vote for what they justifiedly believe promotes the common good. Even if many voters intend to promote the common good, they all too often lack sufficient evidence to justify the beliefs they advocate. When they do vote, they pollute democracy with their votes and make it more likely that people will have to suffer from bad governance.

Personal account

Sign in with email/username & password
Get email alerts
Save searches
Purchase content
Activate your purchase/trial code
Add your ORCID iD

Institutional access

Sign in with username/password
Recommend to your librarian
Institutional account management
Get help with access

Access to content on Oxford Academic is often provided through institutional subscriptions and purchases. If you are a member of an institution with an active account, you may be able to access content in one of the following ways:

IP based access

Typically, access is provided across an institutional network to a range of IP addresses. This authentication occurs automatically, and it is not possible to sign out of an IP authenticated account.

Choose this option to get remote access when outside your institution. Shibboleth/Open Athens technology is used to provide single sign-on between your institutionâ€™s website and Oxford Academic.

Click Sign in through your institution.
Select your institution from the list provided, which will take you to your institution's website to sign in.
When on the institution site, please use the credentials provided by your institution. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.
Following successful sign in, you will be returned to Oxford Academic.

If your institution is not listed or you cannot sign in to your institutionâ€™s website, please contact your librarian or administrator.

Enter your library card number to sign in. If you cannot sign in, please contact your librarian.

Society Members

Society member access to a journal is achieved in one of the following ways:

Sign in through society site

Many societies offer single sign-on between the society website and Oxford Academic. If you see â€˜Sign in through society siteâ€™ in the sign in pane within a journal:

Click Sign in through society site.
When on the society site, please use the credentials provided by that society. Do not use an Oxford Academic personal account.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Sign in using a personal account

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members. See below.

A personal account can be used to get email alerts, save searches, purchase content, and activate subscriptions.

Some societies use Oxford Academic personal accounts to provide access to their members.

Viewing your signed in accounts

Click the account icon in the top right to:

View your signed in personal account and access account management features.
View the institutional accounts that are providing access.

Signed in but can't access content

Oxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian.

For librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more.

Our books are available by subscription or purchase to libraries and institutions.

Month:	Total Views:
October 2022	5
November 2022	13
December 2022	3
January 2023	4
February 2023	4
March 2023	7
April 2023	1
May 2023	1
June 2023	3
July 2023	2
August 2023	2
September 2023	4
October 2023	3
November 2023	4
December 2023	2
January 2024	5
February 2024	3
March 2024	2
April 2024	1
May 2024	1
June 2024	2
July 2024	5
August 2024	3

About Oxford Academic
Publish journals with us
University press partners
What we publish
New features
Open access
Rights and permissions
Accessibility
Advertising
Media enquiries
Oxford University Press
Oxford Languages
University of Oxford

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide

Cookie settings
Cookie policy
Privacy policy
Legal notice

This Feature Is Available To Subscribers Only

This PDF is available to Subscribers Only

For full access to this pdf, sign in to an existing account, or purchase an annual subscription.

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

We're Hiring!
Help Center

Ethics of e-voting: An essay on requirements and values in Internet elections

Related Papers

… Inclusion: Societal and Organizational Implications for …

Wolter Pieters

Fifth international conference on Cultural Attitudes …

Magdalena Musial-Karg

From the 1970s, the world has been undergoing the so-called “digital revolution” generally understood as the change from the me chanical and electronic technologies to the high tech, digital ones. The role of ICT has so gained in importance that some theoreticians of democracy speak of the necessity of paradigm changing as regards both the understanding of a democratic system and introdu-cing the notion of electronic democracy (e-democracy). The aim of this text is analyzing the electronic voting (e-voting) as one of important forms of electronic democracy. The article attempts at approaching several research questions. First, what is the impact of ICT on voting procedures? Secondly, what is the essence of electronic voting and what are its main features? Finally, what are the advantages and fears related to e-voting systems? This paper gives a theoretical overview of the electronic democracy and electronic voting, and demonstrates their essence, characteristics, goals. The author tries to present and critically assess the main drawbacks and problems of the existing e-voting systems. The theoretical considerations framework is based mainly on the concept of electronic democracy created by Martin Hagen. With reference to electronic voting, the author of this article uses definitions as given either by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or the Competence Center for Electronic Voting and Participation. She also uses definitions constructed by Andrzej Kaczmarczyk, an e-voting expert.

Electronic Voting and Democracy. A Comparative Analysis.

Hubertus Buchstein

Przegląd Politologiczny

Maciej Górny

The aim of the article is to present the opportunities and threats resulting from the implementation of voting via the Internet (i-voting) and to discuss the conditions for effective implementation of this alternative voting procedure on the example of Estonia and Switzerland. Estonia is the only country in the world where i-voting is widely used. In Switzerland, on the other hand, this voting method has been used most often, although its use has been suspended for several years due to legal, infrastructural and political problems. What are the conditions for successfully implementing Internet voting? The attempt to answer this research question was possible thanks to the use of the following research methods: comparative, formal-dogmatic, behavioral and modified historical method. The key conclusion is that the implementation of i-voting must be preceded by many years of political, legal, infrastructural and social activities, and that the created system must be as transparent as p...

Dmytro Khutkyy

The aim of this paper is to identify, structure, and remit the risks of electronic voting by offering practical solutions for countering them. In the context of a wider electoral reform, after a cost-benefit analysis has been performed and the introduction of internet voting has been decided upon, this policy paper can help foresee presumable challenges and refute ungrounded objections. In contrast to most publications that either focus on particular risks or describe proper i-voting, this paper inspects multiple challenges and addresses them. It is intended as a reference for politicians, public officials, civic activists, and citizens overall for preventing, detecting, and mitigating i-voting misuse, safeguarding e-democracy against distortions, and strengthening good governance. This study is based on a desk review of existing academic and policy research and the analysis of the available secondary data on i-voting statistics. The conclusions are drawn from national and local cases, and therefore are potentially applicable to a range of remote i-voting designs in diverse political contexts.

EIIC 2014. The 3rd Electronic International Interdisciplinary Conference, Proceedings in Electronic International Interdisciplinary Conference, eds. M. Mokrys, S. Badura, A. Lieskovsky, EDIS – Publishing Institution of the University of Zilina, Slovakia, ss. 311-315, ISSN 978-80-554-0921-4.

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) constitute a crucial element of globalisation and computerization processes. ICT are not exclusively present in the economy, entertainment, trade or banking, but they are also used in politics or social area. Public institutions employ ICT (particularly the Internet) for informational and educational purposes as well as for improving the efficiency of state institutions and bodies. With the availability of new (apart from traditional) forms of participation, such as e.g. electronic community consultations, electronic people's initiatives, participatory budgeting, e-voting, the citizens are offered the possibility to increase their activity on the political scene and their real influence on the decision-making process. It’s due to the fact that modern technologies can improve the interactions occurring between voters and political institutions, political parties, or politicians. One of such interaction is the process of voting, which in some countries is supported by ICT (e-voting). This article aims primarily at providing answers for questions: about the most important problems connected with introduction of this more and more popular way of civic participation in politics and with the use of e-voting in general elections, as well as about the most crucial and most frequent uncertainties that e-voting implies.

Robert Krimmer

Journal of Information Security and Applications

Karen Renaud

Loading Preview

Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.

VOTERS PRACTICES IN THE PHILIPPINE ELECTION

January 2020

Cebu Normal University

Abstract and Figures

Discover the world's research

25+ million members
160+ million publication pages
2.3+ billion citations

Dejierey Jade R. Delan

X. J. G. Canares
L. L. C. Estipular
T. M. A. Protacio

Jerimy Javines

EUR ECON REV

K O'connor
Recruit researchers
Join for free
Login Email Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google Welcome back! Please log in. Email · Hint Tip: Most researchers use their institutional email address as their ResearchGate login Password Forgot password? Keep me logged in Log in or Continue with Google No account? Sign up

Between Trust and Democracy: The Election Commission of India and the Question of Constitutional Accountability

in Constitutional Resilience in South Asia (Jhaveri et al. eds, Bloomsbury 2023).

37 Pages Posted: 9 Apr 2020 Last revised: 5 May 2024

M. Mohsin Alam Bhat

Queen Mary University of London, School of Law; Yale Law School

Date Written: February 1, 2020

The scholars of comparative law and politics have acknowledged the Election Commission of India (‘the ECI’) as the institution that has played a central role in maintaining electoral fairness and integrity in India. The ECI has consistently acquired wider powers, covering the administration of elections as well as a range of allied activities. Despite its important, there is a dearth of constitutional theorising about the institution. This also extends to the question of the ECI’s constitutional accountability. The severe criticism of the institution’s functioning by the opposition parties and the civil society particularly in the 2019 national elections necessitates a serious investigation into these institutional questions. This chapter critiques the Indian Supreme Court’s elections jurisprudence from the perspective of the ECI’s constitutional accountability, and argues that it has sidelined this serious aspect. In a series of celebrated judgments, the Court adopted the framework of discursive democracy that enhanced the demands of transparency and accountability of political actors. These judgments simultaneously strengthened the ECI but left its accountability unattended. The Court adopted a different framework with respect to the ECI. This framework was based on trust that relied on institutional competence and commitment. The chapter argues that the framework of trust has failed to address the serious concerns of the ECI’s accountability and transparency. It proposes that the Court must adopt tools from the framework of democracy to strengthen these values.

Keywords: India, electoral commissions, election commission of india, democracy, accountability, trust, NMIs, non-majoritarian institutions, bureaucracy, expert bodies, Supreme Court of India, public trust, electoral integrity, EVMs

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

M. Mohsin Alam Bhat (Contact Author)

Queen mary university of london, school of law ( email ).

Mile End Road Lincoln's Inn Fields London, London E1 4NS United Kingdom

Yale Law School ( email )

P.O. Box 208215 New Haven, CT 06520-8215 United States

Do you have a job opening that you would like to promote on SSRN?

Paper statistics, related ejournals, comparative & non-u.s. constitutional law ejournal.

Subscribe to this fee journal for more curated articles on this topic

Law & Society: Legislation eJournal

Political behavior: voting & public opinion ejournal, india law ejournal, political economy - development: political institutions ejournal, election law & voting rights ejournal.

Subscribe to this free journal for more curated articles on this topic

IMAGES

Congressional Ethics and Third-Party Candidates
Ethics Reflection Paper
Educational Research Ethics
Congressional Ethics and Third-Party Candidates
The Ethics of Voting
(PDF) RESEARCH AND PUBLICATION ETHICS

VIDEO

November 12, 2023
Political parties to sign election ethics charter
Ron Fournier: Mike Huckabee’s ethics could make Clintons blush
Vote Your Values: Lead with Character This Election
Charter of election ethics ceremony
research ethics meaning #research ethics kya hai

COMMENTS

The Ethics of Voting (New in Paper) on JSTOR
At most, they have duties of beneficence and reciprocity that can be discharged any number of ways besides voting. 2. In general, voters should vote for things that tend to promote the common good rather than try to promote narrow self-interest at the expense of the common good. 3. Voters face epistemic requirements.
PDF V oting as an Ethical Issue
I N T R O D U C T I O N. Voting as an Ethic. l Issue Why Voting MattersWhen we vote, we can make. government better or worse. In turn, our votes can make peopl. 's lives better or worse.If we make bad choices at the polls, we get racist, s. xist, and homopho-bic laws. Economic opportunities va. ish or fail to materialize. We fi ght.
The Ethics and Rationality of Voting
The expressive theory of voting (G. Brennan and Lomasky 1993) holds that voters vote in order to express themselves. On the expressive theory, voting is a consumption activity rather than a productive activity; it is more like reading a book for pleasure than it is like reading a book to develop a new skill.
Voting behavior as social action: Habits, norms, values, and
For the German federal election of 2017, the fifth wave—taking 8,864 eligible voters into account—has been tailored to multivariate analyses. For the parliamentary election of the Bundestag in 2013, Wave 3 (4,404 eligible voters) has been chosen, and for the 2009 federal election, the first two waves have been used (3,696 eligible voters).
Voting and winning: perceptions of electoral integrity in consolidating
It shows that, on average, respondents become 1.39 points (dashed line) more trusting of elections on a 0-32 scale. Though small, the difference is statistically significant from 0 (t (2285) = 13.44, p < 0.001). Figure 1. Electoral trust in the pre- and post-electoral wave.
Voting Intention and Choices: Are Voters Always Rational and ...
Human rationality-the ability to behave in order to maximize the achievement of their presumed goals (i.e., their optimal choices)-is the foundation for democracy. Research evidence has suggested that voters may not make decisions after exhaustively processing relevant information; instead, our decision-making capacity may be restricted by our own biases and the environment. In this paper ...
Ethical Standards For Election Administration
Elections in the United States are conducted by dedicated election officials committed to ensuring fairness, accuracy, accessibility, and security. For most election officials, ethical standards are based on personal ethical convictions, commitment to abide by state ethics laws, and dedication to follow their oath of office.
The Ethics of Voting
The Ethics of Voting. Nothing is more integral to democracy than voting. Most people believe that every citizen has the civic duty or moral obligation to vote, that any sincere vote is morally acceptable, and that buying, selling, or trading votes is inherently wrong. In this provocative book, Jason Brennan challenges our fundamental ...
Electoral management and the organisational determinants of electoral
As we have set out in the previous sections, given the importance of electoral management for election integrity, this is a vital research agenda that needs to be taken forward. The articles in this special issue do this, each investigating a part of this puzzle, as we outline in the conclusion section. ... EMB performance and outcomes are ...
Voting as an Ethical Issue
Voting is the principal way that citizens influence the quality of government. As such, individual voters have moral obligations concerning how they vote. Indeed, how individuals vote can help or harm people. Electoral outcomes can lead to a bad government, which can exploit the minority for the benefit of the majority.
(PDF) Political Power and Politic Ethical Integrity Of Election
of the code of ethics by election organizers. Article 111 paragraph (3) of Law Number 15 of ... This paper is in the form of legal research in literature studies in the form of books and journals ...
(PDF) Ethics of e-voting: An essay on requirements and values in
Ethics of e-voting An essay on requirements and values in Internet elections W. Pieters Institute for computing and information sciences Radboud University Nijmegen P.O. Box 9010 6500 GL Nijmegen The Netherlands tel. +31 24 365 25 99 fax +31 24 365 31 37 [email protected] M.J. Becker Centre for ethics Radboud University Nijmegen P.O. Box 9103 6500 HD Nijmegen The Netherlands tel. +31 24 361 62 ...
Electoral Studies
Electoral Studies is an international journal dedicated to the study of elections and voting in different parts of the world. With a reputation established over more than 35 years of publication, Electoral Studies is widely recognised as a major journal in the field. It publishes theoretically informed and empirically robust research on all ...
Role of News Media in Enhancing Voters' Engagement: A ...
This meta-analytic study reviews empirical research published from 2007 to 2013 with an aim of providing robust conclusions about the relationship between social media use and citizen engagement.
Anticipating and Addressing the Ethical Implications of ...
Deepfakes have significant implications for the integrity of many social domains including that of elections. Focusing on the 2020 U.S. presidential election and using an anticipatory approach, this paper examines the ethical issues raised by deepfakes and discusses strategies for addressing these issues.
Cambridge Analytica: Ethics And Online Manipulation With Decision
Third, CA was mentioned to participate in the 2017 elections in Kenya. The company design ed the electoral campaign, as well as took part in its rebranding and research on more than 50 thousand
Introduction: A Decade of Social Media Elections
Abstract. Social media has been a part of election campaigns for more than a decade. In this special issue, we combine longitudinal and cross-national studies of social media in election campaigns, expanding the time span as well as number of countries compared to former comparative studies. The four papers present examples of longitudinal ...
VOTERS PRACTICES IN THE PHILIPPINE ELECTION
Join ResearchGate to discover and stay up-to-date with the latest research from leading experts in Elections and many other scientific topics. Join for free ResearchGate iOS App
A reflection on research ethics and citizen science
Research ethics review has become an integral component of medical and social science research. Almost every postsecondary institution supports at least one research ethics board (REB), also called research ethics committee (REC) or institutional review board (IRB), and larger institutions may have multiple boards serving different areas of research (e.g. biomedical, social sciences).
Between Trust and Democracy: The Election Commission of India ...
The scholars of comparative law and politics have acknowledged the Election Commission of India ('the ECI') as the institution that has played a central role in maintaining electoral fairness and integrity in India. The ECI has consistently acquired wider powers, covering the administration of elections as well as a range of allied activities.