| Viewing Single Post From: Musings of a Superfluous Man | |
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| Duke parent 2004 | Aug 17 2008, 07:59 PM |
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THE RATIONAL VOTER I see that the newly released movie Swing Vote, starring Kevin Costner, has failed to overwork cash registers at box offices around the country. I have not seen the movie. And as I rarely prefer swapping my comfortable living room for the local multiplex, where one risks being enfeebled by picking up “Like, you know . . . “ from every one of the thousand teenagers in the joint, you now have a second good reason for asking someone else to give you his take on the film. (I reserve the right, of course, to slink off to the cinema if the only other entertainment my clever wife will permit of an evening is to watch a Barbara Walters special or a re-run of Dances with Wolves.) At any rate, I’ve seen enough from the previews of Swing Vote to gather that it’s a comedy built on a highly improbable scenario: Costner finds himself the “deciding” voter in a presidential election. I’m blathering here about a movie I haven’t seen, because its premise takes me back thirty-five years to a spirited debate, in which I got trounced. “Steve,” the winner of that debate, was an assistant professor of political science at the same university in which I was then hiding out as a graduate student. A graduate of Cal Tech who had earned a master’s degree in physics before completing a doctorate in political science at Yale, Steve was the department’s specialist in quantitative methods. I was particularly drawn to him because he was anything but a true believer in the wholesale application of mathematics to the problems and concerns of political science. Indeed, he had only recently set off a bomb by publishing in the discipline’s flagship journal an article that shredded the work of several of the most highly regarded “quant” scholars in the field. One day Steve happened on a bunch of us in the student lounge as we were arguing vehemently for our favorite candidates in an upcoming election. He immediately suggested we not sacrifice friendship to politics, that only the foolhardy would risk losing friends over an election in which our votes couldn’t possibly be of consequence. I believe I was the first graduate student to break the stunned silence. “How can you say such a thing?” I protested. “How can you impugn the very foundation of our democracy? You are speaking nonsense.” Steve responded most decorously by summarizing the best of the recent literature, to which he himself had contributed, on “the rational voter.” Here mathematics was appropriate, he averred. In a statewide or national election, one stood a very much better chance of getting injured on the way to the polls than of changing the outcome of the vote. Because the “deciding vote” meant by definition the vote that would give the winner a one-vote victory, the likelihood of ever seeing an election reduced to that one single outcome was vanishingly small. At all of 5’ 8” tall, I should sooner expect to be paid a million bucks by an NBA team to step into the circle for the opening center jump. For every objection I raised, Steve countered persuasively. When I asked him to imagine the scene were many “rational” voters thereby to abstain from voting, he responded that many already were abstaining and, yet, the count of those still going to the polls was more than large enough to sustain the mathematics. When I blustered that abstaining from voting would be un-American, he replied that good reasons could still be adduced for voting, but that among them should not be an expectation of changing the outcome. When I challenged him to imagine his own regret were he not to vote in an election that did in fact turn on just one vote, he laughed while assuring me that no such outcome could persist, for the public would demand recounts until the margin of victory proved to be something more “acceptable” than one vote. So how had we all managed to fool ourselves for so long? Steve noted that most voters carried over, often from their youth, experiences in voting that were not applicable to state and national elections. We had voted for club and class presidents, officers of sororities or fraternities, and perhaps for friends or neighbors in local elections. In these settings it made sense to take our vote seriously. I then remembered the very first governmental election in which I cast a ballot. It also happened to be the first election in which I campaigned for one of the candidates, who happened to be my father. In an election decided by only five votes, my father, in his first try, won a seat in the county legislature. But there were fewer than 200 ballots cast in that contest! Perhaps Steve was on to something. The more I weighed Steve’s argument, and the deeper I got into the literature to which he pointed me, the more enamored I became of Edmund Burke’s small battalions and Alexis de Tocqueville’s celebration of America as the land of intermediary associations. I’ve tested my growing preference for the local in matters political by asking friends and acquaintances a simple question: Are you more likely to cross party lines in a national election or in a local one? The more thoughtful, and honest, among them usually nod in favor of the local. After all, they might know, know somebody who knows, or even work with that candidate from the other party. And the opportunities for meeting, conversing with, and even lambasting the local candidate or officeholder are far more attractive than is the case with those big-shot pols slavered over by the television networks. Yes, in local elections the fate of the free world is not at stake. But for at least this voter, that’s quite alright.  |
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| Musings of a Superfluous Man · DUKE LACROSSE - Liestoppers | |
4:26 PM Dec 4
