Furthermore, since voting is by its nature irrational, calling attention to the matter makes acutely uncomfortable the people who (a) like to showcase their tribal loyalties but (b) don’t like to admit that all they’re doing is showcasing their tribal loyalties. As a friend of mine is fond of pointing out: grass-eaters get awfully dangerous when they stampede.
Saturday, May 7, 2011
QoTD -- Hanson's Razor Edition
Blunt Object:
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6 comments:
Thank you, sir.
I'm not satisfied with the whole post -- I'm stumbling my way towards a point, but haven't properly articulated it yet. There are plenty of good arguments against mandated voting, but seems to me that "you should vote in order to strengthen freedom and democracy" contradicts itself, and I ought to be able to argue that more sharply.
blunt,
Were I trying...I'd separate your argument.
Voting strengthens democracy by means of legitimization. Anti-voting types like us are actively delegitimizing democracy.
On the other hand, democracy and freedom are not precisely orthogonal, but the relationship is also at best not-well understood.
I think if you separate the strands, you'd get further.
But whatever, the quote rocks.
If one has very low standards for "legitimate democracy", then mandatory voting strengthens democracy in the same way that mandatory Party membership strengthens Communism. East Germany was an example of the edge case for that kind of democracy. So was Mubarak's Egypt.
What most people mean by "legitimate democracy" is a state whose leaders have the express and voluntary support of a sufficient number of voters. When the state chips away at the number of permissible or acceptable ways for people to vote -- including things like not voting at all -- it erodes the "voluntary" part.
blunt,
The big issue that we have is that legitimacy is very rarely an intellectual concept. Legitimacy is felt, rather than thought.
If you have a case (the USA) wherein 2/3 of the populace are registered voters, 2/3 of the registered voters vote in an election, and 2/5 of the actual voters voted for a winning candidate (Bill Clinton)...then rather than having a plausible case for a government (50%+1 of the population voted for me), we instead have 18% of the population voted for Bill Clinton, so he's president. Hmmm....That's MUCH harder to make seem like a decent method for choosing a leader.
While I accept your criticism from Egypt...the populace in Belgium with compulsory voting, but multiple options may feel more legitimate than the US?
Yeah, I could see an argument that Belgian Democracy > American Democracy, based on the number of "acceptable" options. I'm pretty heavily biased there, though, as I've come to love coalition and minority governments.
That said, I'm not trying to rank democracies by "legitimacy"; I'm just trying to argue that removing or discouraging voting options, at the margins, undermines that "legitimacy".
^- that's my Google account, apparently. You'd think Blogger would be able to remember account settings within a single comment thread, but no....
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