As another US election draws nigh, politics becomes the sporting talk of a certain American cross section. I’m much more inclined to be an observer rather than participant, but inevitably I am drawn in to an idle political chat or two. If nothing else, these conversations force me to confront the fact that my voting views are not as anodyne as I’d like to think, and that I’d better be ready to explain myself satisfactorily.
Here’s a short and–I hope–entertaining movie I made based on how these conversations run, with the main differences being that I’m not this articulate in person and that I usually fail to convince the person I’m not some “communist whack-a-doo.” If you’re having a hard time understanding the robo-speak, you can turn on closed captions:
The main points I try to get across in the movie:
- There are many reasons to vote.
- What many, if not most, voters use as their stated reason for voting (i.e. its instrumentality, or ability to decide who wins) is irrational in a dry, technical, uncontroversial way.
- This is OK, because voters’ behavior reveals their voting to be for other valid reasons, such as for personal expression, group affiliation, the fulfilling of a civic duty, etc. In other words, they’re behaving like me, even if they don’t acknowledge it.
One thing I don’t mention in the movie is that I, along with plenty of others in the electorate, rarely bother to vote in small and/or local elections when the instrumental value of a vote is orders of magnitude higher. You can try to explain this by pointing out the smaller stakes, but in my my view it’s another bit of evidence that people vote expressively.
(The paper referenced in the movie on voting probability in the 2008 can be found here (.pdf), and the statistic about death from a non-poisonous arthropod is from the always fun to use Book of Odds.)
Well done. You’ve very smartly illustrated your point with signature humor.
I was “mehhh” on the Lost finale.
That’s all I need to know, Michael. All. I needed. To know.
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