Now, is voting for Dems rather than third parties an instance of this kind of reasoning? Absolutely not. Strategic voting involves a curious mixture of strategic thinking and strategic blindness. One is simultaneously required to count one's vote for a third party as a wasted vote, but one's vote for the Dems as carrying great weight. The fact is that whether you consider the public good to be provided as (a) a victory for the Democrats over the Republicans or (b) the establishment of a viable electoral force on the Left, your individual vote is of no significant account. If people thought the way the collective action problem suggests people think, then people would simply not vote, on the entirely reasonable proposition that their individual vote will never, in the course of their lifetime, sway even the most inconsequential election in one direction or another.
Instead, we get the phenomenon of double accounting. For some reason, people who might otherwise be tempted to vote for a third party manage to convince themselves that their vote given to a third party is inconsequential, while that same vote simultaneously denied to the Dems is of enormous consequence. The fallacy of strategic voting is, in my view, the strongest single empirical refutation of rational choice theory.
Dare I suggest hegemony at work here?
MM
>>> nathan at newman.org 05/29/02 01:30PM >>>
----- Original Message -----
From: "Carrol Cox" <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
>Nathan is a real puzzle. He isn't stupid. He isn't a coward. He has very
>few reactionary positions (the only one I can remember is his offensive
>support of U.S. war crimes in Yugoslavia). He has an activist record to
>be proud of. So his absurd attachment to the DP is hard to explain or
>understand.
Yet my attachment is merely a more articulated version of the attachment of millions of progressive voters-- black, latino, union, feminist, even socialist. You seem by your statement to be explaining all those millions of Democratic votes by some combination of stupidity or cowardice. It is precisely because I understand and identify with those millions of other voters that I believe that third party politics is so doomed. It's just unconvincing as a strategy and, by definition, if it can't convince those millions of progressive voters, it can't suceed no matter how nice it might sound in the abstract.
Even if I could be convinced personally, on balance, that third party voting would be better, that reasonable attachment to the Dems means that there is a collective action problem barring third party success, since everyone will not jump at once, and as long as most people are not jumping, even fewer will jump. So third party voting is and will be restricted to the small group of folks willing to ignore the basic reality of the irrationality of their third party voting.
In a sense, I have the reverse puzzlement of Carrol. Most folks on this list are intelligent but refuse to recognize the inherent collective action obstacle to third party success. Even if they personally like the idea, since it can't succeed, their dogged support for it is puzzling. So much intellectual firepower is deployed to argue for Nixon's relative merits, yet very little is deployed in strategies for making the lesser-evil reality of the two-party system work better for progressives. I hardly think the political reality of Democratic leaders is ideal as it is, but also just see the irrationality of organizing around a strategy that is inherently self-defeating. So the third alternative is to figure out how to strategically make the best of the real options in the electoral realm that we have available.
-- Nathan Newman