The analyses I’ve seen that purport to prove that voting is all but irrelevant and therefore irrational to bother with generally assume that voting is the only action that can be taken by the individual to affect the result.
This does not appear to describe real-life behaviour, where people state their voting intentions and try to get as many other people to vote that way as possible—the participants understand that having as many people as possible join in increases the likelihood of the desired effect. This can sway seats and, scaled up, whole elections.
(This is similar to the problem with the analysis of how to donate to charity: it assumes people donate and don’t tell anyone. This also does not describe what happens in the real world.)
Is there an analysis purporting to prove bothering to vote irrational that explicitly includes this effect in a plausibly quantifiable fashion?
Standard analyses have several orders of magnitude of safety margin. Very few people will sway thousands of other voters through casual conversation about voting without much additional effort (which raises costs along with benefits).
The analyses I’ve seen that purport to prove that voting is all but irrelevant and therefore irrational to bother with generally assume that voting is the only action that can be taken by the individual to affect the result.
This does not appear to describe real-life behaviour, where people state their voting intentions and try to get as many other people to vote that way as possible—the participants understand that having as many people as possible join in increases the likelihood of the desired effect. This can sway seats and, scaled up, whole elections.
(This is similar to the problem with the analysis of how to donate to charity: it assumes people donate and don’t tell anyone. This also does not describe what happens in the real world.)
Is there an analysis purporting to prove bothering to vote irrational that explicitly includes this effect in a plausibly quantifiable fashion?
Standard analyses have several orders of magnitude of safety margin. Very few people will sway thousands of other voters through casual conversation about voting without much additional effort (which raises costs along with benefits).