Vindicating Anthony Downs

P ositive turnout rates in the United States and elsewhere are widely considered “an embarrassing limitation of the economic approach to politics” because, for any one voter, “the costs of casting a ballot in any large election are almost always greater than the potential benefits, which are dependent on the unlikely occurrence of casting the winning or tie vote in an election” ~Knack 1992, 133!. Green and Shapiro ~1994!, whose scathing critique of the rational choice field centers on the work of Anthony Downs ~1957!, trenchantly put it: “Rational choice theorists have trotted out an astonishing variety of conjectures about the costs and benefits of voting, in the process generating an enormous literature, possibly larger in terms of academic citations and sheer bibliographic length than any other rational choice literature in American politics” ~47–48!, yet they still have no answer as to why people vote when, according to their arguments, reason says they ought not.1 Grofman ~1993!, paraphrasing Morris Fiorina, has referred to the failure of rational choice theory to explain turnout as the “paradox that ate rational choice.”2 We disagree. Our rejoinder is a simple one. Downs was right. You shouldn’t vote. And, as more people come to recognize that fact, they’ll stop. Our proof proceeds in four parts. First we demonstrate that Downs is rising in importance in the academic literature on voting and turnout relative to classic works emphasizing civic duty ~Berelson et al. 1954; Almond and Verba 1963! or partisan attachments ~Campbell et al. 1960!. Second, we demonstrate that the rise in Downs’ influence relative to these other works is accompanied by a general decline in voting in the U.S., with the increased turnout in the 2004 election an easily explainable minor blip. Third, we provide limited but suggestive evidence that those who presumably know Downs best and are most likely to find his arguments credible—economists—are much less likely to vote than their level of education might predict. Finally, we account for the fact that people still vote by providing compelling evidence that most people have never heard of Downs, and thus are unlikely to be familiar with the ideas that made him “famous” ~sic!!.