What reason does an individual have to vote?

Question

Given that the outcome of an election will be the same whether one individual votes or not, what reason does that individual have to vote?

Obviously there is an extremely unlikely case where one vote will change the outcome.

As a group, the voters do have motivation to vote because they can collectively change the outcome. However, an individual's decision to vote or not vote this will not necessarily affect the choices of the rest of the group.

Edit: I'm interested in purely rational motivations. It's clearly rational for a group to vote but not so at an individual level. (leaving aside feeling pride or belongingness or pressure from others).

Answer 1

With Kantian point of view, we can say "Not voting is not universilizable", because if no-one voted, then the elections would not work and that would be a contradiction to the system itself.

Then, not voting is not an ethical behaviour, unless you want the system to fall.

Answer 2

Voters have social reasons to vote.

Depending on the country, these may be unambiguously rational as well. For instance, in Australia voting is mandatory and voting day is a national holiday. If you are already forced to vote, you may as well actually vote in your interest instead of against your interest or randomly.

There can still be social reasons without legal backing. In the United States, for instance, they very commonly give out "I voted" stickers at polling places, rendering it easy to tell when someone has voted (and wants others to know). This can serve as sort of a social contract: you will be chided by your friends if you don't vote, and your participation can be (weakly) verified. Thus, voting can be a way to maintain or enhance your social standing.

Finally, as humans aren't rational, it's easy to trick us into doing something that's good for the community even if it has no hope of benefiting us individually. We act as though our actions are taking place in an environment where we can build reputation and have many future reciprocal actions ahead of us, probably since throughout most of our evolutionary history, this was true. These days, with citizen/state or stranger/stranger interactions, it's much less true, but the instincts remain. So all you have to do is make voting seem like a noble thing to do and (many of) our brains will supply the requisite reward to us when we follow along and do it.

Answer 3

Here's an attempt at a rationalisation of voting for the individual:

1 If you choose not to vote once, you are significantly more likely to choose not to vote again. After all, you're unusual if you're in a western democracy and you are not at all disillusioned with politics and have nothing more enjoyable to do on polling day with your time.

Summary: Not voting leads to greater not voting in the future.

2 People tend to rationalise and defend their behaviour, so if you choose to not vote regularly, you are likely over time to come to believe that this is a good decision and become an advocate of not voting.

Summary: Habitual non-voting leads to advocating non-voting.

3 People are social creatures and much more heavily influenced by the norms of their peers and neighbours than they like to think. If you don't vote and advocate non-voting you are likely to strongly influence those you interact with, and most strongly affect those who normally share your opinions.

Summary: Your non-voting actions and views spread to people, and most strongly to people like you.

4 Politicians publicly advocate policies that are likely to garner large numbers of votes. If a group (eg people under 30 in the UK) vote significantly less often, parties use the money available to favour groups that vote in larger numbers (retired people vote in much greater numbers in the UK). There is thus a genuine but small risk that if your non-voting ideas spread amongst like-minded people, government policies will eventually disfavour people like you. The risk of non-minor future harm can be weighed against present inconvenience of voting. If the like-minded group we're discussing is thoughtful people, that could be quite devastating.

Summary: It's not worth risking disenfranchising the people with whom you have the most in common.

Overall summary

Humans are social and you don't act in isolation - you will influence people like you not to vote, and as a group you will become more disenfranchised. As an individual you can work towards or against group disenfranchisement, but are very unlikely to be neutral. Group disenfranchisement could lead to significant negative consequences for you as an individual.

Critique

That's not at all watertight, and the effects may be too slow to affect you in your lifetime. This sort of reasoning is much stronger to argue that you should attempt to befriend newspaper editors.

Rationality explains very little of human behaviour anyway. (I vote regularly, but not for any of these reasons.)

Nevertheless, this was an interesting question and a good challenge.

Answer 4

I suppose there are many reasons why individuals vote, including psychological and sociological reasons.

For example, an individual could perceive the act of voting as fulfilling a duty, or as validating his being a member in a community, etc, etc... probably as many reasons as there are neurons in a brain.

Answer 5

At the national level it doesn't really make a difference. However, at the local level it does, and the politicians selected at the local level can have a larger influence.

Answer 6

The rational reason to vote is that it is one of a few ways one can influence governmental affairs. Rationality does not depend on the probability that the outcome of an election will be decided by one person's vote.

Answer 7

Because voting is what makes you an active and useful part of the society. In ancient Greece, people who had the right to take part in politics but chose not to where called "αχρείοι" (achreioi). It means the ones with no use, since they had no use in society. It was not punishable, but it was one of the worst values someone could have as a member of a society. You should read Plato's Republic for a description of the perfect society with justice.

Answer 8

In a country ruled by plutocrats, voting gives us little people the illusion of control. It gives the masses the illusion that there is someone is charge who takes care of their opinions, their wants and their needs.

"Voting" is a form of pacification that works by convincing people they have the power to get rid of poor leadership by coloring a little circle every few years, instead of starting a revolution, like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson did a couple of centures ago.

Politics in America is in a case which sadly requires attention. The system set up by our law and our usage doesn’t work,—or at least it can’t be depended on; it is made to work only by a most unreasonable expenditure of labor and pains. The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.

— Woodrow Wilson, 1912

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.

— Edward Bernays, 1920

Forget the politicians; they're irrelevant. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls; they've got the judges in their back pockets; and they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They've got you by the balls.

— George Carlin, 2005

More people are discovering that the system is all rigged and voting is just pacification. I see elections as so much of a charade.

— Ron Paul, 2016

Answer 9

I am not familiar with other countries, but for me, in the USA, there are two reasons for voting. 1) voting facilitates my re-entry into the USA, and 2) my vote makes my party's influence stronger.