These kinds of studies add to a body of research showing that our social relationships and emotions play a significant role in how we vote. For example, one study found that when people are told that they might be recognized for voting in a local newspaper or put on an honor roll of voters—to induce feelings of pride—they vote in higher numbers.
Alternatively, when people are warned that their name will be published in a local newspaper for not voting—to induce feelings of shame—this also increases voting. Shame seems to have even more impact than pride.
Still, feeling shame may have downsides that feeling pride wouldn’t, which perhaps makes a case for more positive incentives for voting, while still making use of social pressure tactics.
“People don’t want to have a reputation for being shirkers or for freeriding on the efforts of others,” says Panagopoulos. “But, even though it’s not as powerful as inducing shame, the effects of inducing pride are roughly similar to expressing gratitude.”
https://twitter.com/EPoe187/status/1289989389209047040
To understand social media, you have to understand signaling theory, because social media is essentially a signaling arena. Behind every tweet, every Facebook post, every Instagram photograph is a primitive motivation: to be liked, admired, and possibly envied.
'Nothing in politics makes sense except in the light of costly signaling theory' HT
$30
Why do people vote, although the act most likely won't affect the electoral outcome? It yields social rewards, that can be measured down to the penny.
Your Vote Doesn't Count
Many people - whether Republican, Democrat, or Independent - felt inspired by their participation in the 2008 campaign. And many more encouraged their friends and families to vote because "it's the right thing to do." But this behavior is somewhat puzzling. Although adults in most democratic countries have the right to vote, each of these votes is just one of millions of others. Politicians frequently tell their supporters "every vote counts," and people usually say they vote in order to help their candidate win. But under what circumstances will a vote actually do that? This basic question has led to a series of investigations by brilliant social scientists, each building on the work of previous thinkers, but all leading, alas, to the same conclusion. Rationally speaking, each vote doesn't count. The reason we vote, it turns out, has a lot to do with our embeddedness in groups and with the power of our social networks.
In 1956, Anthony Downs, an economics graduate student at Stanford, decided to apply the science of "rationality" to the study of politics. He did not mean this as an oxymoron. The word rationality takes on a very specific meaning here, and it is not the opposite of crazy. Rationality means three simple things. First, rational people have preferences and know them. So you prefer an orange to an apple, a dollar to a penny, or a Democrat to a Republican. Or you may be indifferent. The point is that you can compare two things, and you know which one you like better or you know you like or dislike them equally. Second, rational people's choices are consistent. If you would rather have the orange instead of the apple, and the apple instead of the pear, then you will not choose the pear over the orange. Consistency is analogous to transitivity in algebra: if A>B and B>C, then it must be true that A>C. And third, rational people are goal oriented. Once we know what we want, we try to get it.
Downs wanted to see whether voting could be understood as rational, and, if so, under what circumstances. He noticed that politics in the United States was often about two choices, not more. Vote for the Democratic or the Republican. Lower taxes or raise them. Veto the bill or sign it. In fact, our government is replete with formal procedures that reduce a wide range of choices to just two. Downs assumed that voters would focus on one of the alternatives (say Barack Obama) and think carefully about everything that would happen if this alternative were chosen. They would then assign a value to this outcome that described the benefit. In other words, they would try to answer the question, how useful would an Obama presidency be to me personally? Next they would think carefully about the other alternative (say John McCain) and assign a value to that future outcome. Each voter would then vote for the alternative that yielded the greater value for themselves.
But voting is not a required act in the United States, nor is it in most countries in the world. What makes someone to decide to even bother showing up at the polls? Downs noted that voters would take into account the costs of voting. We might need to take time away from our workday or leisure activities to go to the polls. For example, in the 2004 U.S. presidential elections, some voters in Ohio waited in the rain for hours to cast their ballots. It might also be personally costly to spend time collecting information about the election so as to know whom to vote for.
Taking costs and benefits into account, each person would then decide whether to vote. If a voter thought she would benefit equally from both alternatives, she might decide not to pay the costs of voting and stay home. Downs called this rational abstention - it makes sense for some people not to participate because they literally think, "There's not a dime's worth of differences between the two." Conversely, people who believe one alternative is much better than the other are likely to care a lot more about the outcome and would therefore be more likely to stand up and be counted, even if the costs of voting are very high. Those Ohio voters soaked to the bone are just one example of such highly motivated individuals.
But does this really explain why people vote, especially when they may also think that they cannot influence the outcome? Do they simply calculate the benefits and costs and make a choice?
Actually, it's more complicated than that. William Riker, a tremendously influential political scientist at the University of Rochester in the 1960s and 1970s, pointed out that Downs had overlooked that important fact that not just one voter makes this decision but millions. Thus, to determine the value of voting, we need to decide not just who we like better but also the probability that our action - our vote - will help that person win. Calculating this probability may seem like an impossible task because there are so many possible outcomes. Obama could beat McCain by 3 million votes. Or he could beat him by 2,999,999, or he could lose to McCain by 1,345, 267. Or...There are millions of possible outcomes.
Of course, there is only one circumstance in which an individual vote matters. And that is when we expect an exact tie. To see why this is true, ask yourself what would you do if you could look into a crystal ball and see that Obama would win the election by 3 million votes. What effect would your vote have on the outcome? Absolutely none. You could change the margin to 2,999,999 or to 3,000,001, and either way Obama still wins. Notice that the same reasoning is true even for very close elections. No doubt some citizens of Florida felt regret about not voting in 2000 when they learned that George W. Bush had won the state (and therefore the whole election) by 537 votes. But even here, the best a single voter could do would be to change the margin to 536 or 538, neither of which would have changed the outcome.
Why You Don't Need To Vote
So what is the probability of an exact tie? One way of looking at this is to assume that any outcome is equally possible. Suppose 100 million people vote for Obama or McCain. McCain could win 100 million to 0. Or he could win 99,999,999 to 1. Or he could win 99,999,998 to 2. You get the idea. Counting all of these up, there are 100 million different possible outcomes, and only one will be a tie. Because roughly 100 million people vote in the U.S. presidential elections, that would mean that the probability of a tie is about 1 in 100 million.
The exact probability is obviously much more complicated than this, as it is unlikely that Obama or McCain would win every single vote cast. Close elections are probably more likely than landslides. So instead of theorizing about the probability of a tie, we could study lots and lots of real elections to see how often a tie happens. In one survey of 16,577 U.S. elections for the House and Senate over the past hundred years, not one of them yielded a tie. The closest was an election for the representative for New York's 36th congressional district in 1910, when the Democratic candidate won by a single vote, 20,685 to 20,684. However, a subsequent recount in that election found a mathematical error that greatly increased the margin, meaning there are actually no examples of single-vote wins.
In this survey of elections, the average number of voters per election was about one hundred thousand. This is far fewer than the millions who turn out for a national election, and therefore we could expect the odds of a tie in a national election to be even lower. However, calculating this probability is not easy. U.S. presidential elections are complicated because they are not decided by the popular vote. Instead, each state has a number of electors it sends to an electoral college to choose the president. Bigger states get more electors, and most states award all of their electors to the candidate who wins the popular vote in their state. As a result, it is possible to win a few big states by a narrow margin and gain the presidency by winning the electoral college vote while losing the popular vote (George W. Bush did in 2000). Taking all of these complications into account in one big statistical model, political scientists Andrew Gelman, Gary King, and John Boscardin used real data from one hundred years of presidential elections to model the vote within each state and the effect this would have on the electoral college votes. Their model showed that a chance of a tie in any state changing the state's electoral college vote and hence the outcome was about 1 in 10 million.
So let's get back to the original question posed by Anthony Downs. Suppose you were deciding whether to vote in the 2008 election. When, given all this, does it make rational sense to vote?
First, you have to put a value on the difference between a McCain presidency and an Obama presidency. One way to arrive at this value is to ask yourself, How much would I be willing to pay to be the only person who gets to choose whether McCain or Obama is president? You can go to the bank and withdraw any amount you like. How much would you hand over to be the kingmaker, the one person who chooses who runs the country for the next four years? One dollar? Ten dollars? One million dollars? When undergraduates answer this question, they usually give amounts of less than $10, which is astonishing since this is probably the greatest value anyone could get for a $10 purchase. However, for the sake of argument, let's say you think it is a very important decision and you are willing to spend $1,000 of your own money to be the only one person who chooses the next president of the United States.
Second, you have to account for the fact that, by voting, you get the opportunity to determine the election's outcome only when there is an exact tie. Otherwise, the outcome will not change whether you vote or not. So the value of voting is not $1,000; instead, it is a 1 in 10 million chance to obtain the $1,000 value.
Third, and finally, you have to compare your anticipated benefit to the costs of voting. Most people say that the costs of gathering information and going to the polls are not that great, so for convenience let's assume they are $1. They could be much higher, of course, but they are almost certainly greater than zero.
Hence, now that we have your costs and benefits all worked out, the rational analysis of voting suggests that the decision to vote equates roughly with the decision to pay $1 for a lottery ticket that gives you a 1 in 10 million chance of winning a $1,000 prize. Las Vegas would love to sell these tickets. If they could sell 10 million tickets, they would make $10 million dollars and just owe $1,000 in prize money. But even the most ardent gambler would probably refuse to buy them, knowing that the odds are extremely unfair. The average person would probably need other inducements to buy a ticket, because slot machines, blackjack tables, and roulette wheels all have vastly better odds. Even state lotteries that use funds from ticket sales to provide public services rather than prize money typically offer people millions in dollars of winnings, not thousands, for odds like these. And so we are left with the same puzzle we began with. Why do millions of people vote in spite of these odds and payoffs? What is it about elections that make them different from lotteries?
Odds of a single vote determining outcome of a presidential election is about 1 in 10 million in New Mexico and Virginia, and closer to 1 in a billion in California and Texas. Overall, a single vote has a 1 in 60 million chance of making a difference stat.columbia.edu/~gelman/resear
This rational analysis of voting is extraordinarily depressing for (at least) three reasons.
First, it suggests that the core act of modern democratic government makes absolutely no sense. Economists would call voting irrational because it violates the preferences of the people who engage in it. For some reason, people decide to vote even though they would not buy a lottery ticket with identical odds, costs, and payoff.
Economists typically think that people who vote are making a mistake or that there are other benefits to voting that we have not considered. For example, Downs himself noted that people might vote in order to fulfill a sense of civic duty or to preserve the right to vote. Later scholars have pointed out that people might vote because they enjoy expressing themselves - in the same way they enjoy expressing themselves when they cheer for their favorite team at a ballpark.
Second, learning about the irrationality of voting actually depresses turnout. In 1993, Canadian political scientists Andre Blais and Robert Young gave a ten-minute lecture on the rationality of voting to three of their classes and compared their students' voting behavior to that of students in seven other classes who did not hear the lecture. Perhaps not surprisingly, the students who heard the lecture were significantly less likely to vote. Meanwhile, back in the United States, on Election Day in 1996, the Lawrence Journal-World published a guest column by Kansas University political scientist Paul Johnson about his reasons for not voting. He outlined the rational argument and noted that because of it he had not voted in the past thirty years. Within days there were several pointed letters to the editor denouncing his opinion and openly calling for his dismissal from the University. Johnson was not fired but he did register to vote a week later in part to calm the controversy.
Third, the inability to explain the decision to vote calls into question the rational analysis of all political behavior. Since we cannot use cost-benefit analysis to explain something as basic as voter turnout, some scholars argue that it makes no sense to apply rationality to other decisions such as who to vote for, whether to run for office, how to bargain with political adversaries, and so on. Instead of making rational choices that account for the costs and benefits of their actions, political actors might be affected by their emotions or by specific contexts that could not be generalized. In 1990, Stanford professor Morris Fiorina (one of William Riker's students from Rochester) dubbed this perplexing voting pattern "the paradox that ate rational choice." This is academics' way of saying that it makes no sense.
Real Politics in a Social World
In order to find out just how far we could push the idea that voting might spread from person to person to person, we decided to try to answer the question, if I vote, how many other people are likely to vote as well? Many interactions between friends and family might affect the decision to vote. People might be affected by merely observing their acquaintances' behavior (Do they vote? Do they participate in community of group activities? Do they have political signs in their yards?). They might also be affected by political discussions with their acquaintances. Even chance encounters might be influential. As Huckfeldt writes: "The less intimate interactions that we have ignored - discussions over backyard fences, casual encounters while taking walks, or standing in line at the grocery store, and so on - may be politically influential even though they do not occur between intimate associates."
Several election studies show that we typically talk to only a few people about politics; in one study in which people were asked to name their "discussion partners," about 70 percent reported fewer than five (on any topic). Subjects reported talking with each their discussion partners about three times per week, and most people said they talked about politics "sometimes" or "often." And while elections are not always on people's minds, a large number of people reported paying attention to campaigns, especially in the few months immediately prior to an election. Using data from a variety of sources, we estimated that respondents typically have about twenty discussion during the most salient period of a campaign when people are trying to decide whether to vote, but the number of opportunities for influence is probably even greater. A significant percentage of respondents in the Indianapolis/St. Louis Election Study - fully 34 percent - said they tried to convince someone to vote for their preferred candidate, indicating that many people believe there is a chance other will imitate them. These efforts might be aimed at influencing voter choice, but they also convey messages about whether an election is important, which might affect people's decision to show up on Election Day.
But do these attempts to influence others succeed? If imitation is occurring, then we should see a correlation in behavior between two people who are socially connected. And, in fact, that is exactly what we do see when it comes to voter turnout. Even when we control for alternative sources of similar behavior, such as having the same income, education, ideology, or level of political interest, the typical subject is about 15 percent more likely to vote if one of his discussion partners votes. But does this influence spread beyond that to the rest of the network? As it turns out, we see a correlation between people who are directly connected via a common friend. In other words, if you vote, then it increases the likelihood that your friends' friends vote as well.
Scholars who study voting behavior consistently find that people tend to segregate themselves into like-minded groups. As a result, most social ties are between people who share the same interests. When people with ideological or class-based interests are not surrounded by like-minded individuals in their physical neighborhoods and workplaces, they tend to withdraw and form relationships outside those environments. In the Indianapolis Election Study, about two out of every three friends had the same ideology as the respondent. In fact, we can even see this on a large scale in recent U.S. elections by looking at the increase in polarization between Republican "red states" and Democratic "blue states."
Ideological polarization does not effect total turnout, but it does affect how one vote can transform into many votes for your favorite candidate. If liberals and conservatives live side by side, well mixed throughout the population, then a turnout cascade has an equal chance of sending each kind of person to the polls. You might be conservative, but your liberal friend copies you by voting (maybe just to spite you!), and his liberal friend copies him, and her conservative friend copies her, so that by the time the cascade runs out of steam, your vote has influenced an equal number of liberals and conservatives to vote. The net effect would be two extra votes for the liberal candidate and two extra votes for the conservative candidate, so on balance there would be no change. With polarization, however, turnout cascades are more likely to affect like-minded individuals and yield extra votes for your preferred candidate. Suppose instead that your friend is conservative and and so is his friend and so is her friend, so that your decision to vote generates four extra conservative votes and no extra liberal votes. If you knew you could get lots of people to support your favorite candidate just by voting, you would probably be more likely to do it than if you thought your vote would get canceled out by a mix of people from the Left and Right. This means that in ideologically polarized environments, the incentive to vote might be magnified by the number of like-minded individuals you could motivate to go to the polls.
Using everything we learned from Huckfeldt and Sprague about real networks of political interactions, we created a computer model to simulate what happens to the whole network when one person decides to vote. In each simulation, we let everyone in the network try to influence the people to whom they were connected. We then measured the cascades in which one vote turned into two and then four and then eight, just like the shampoo commercial. Repeating the model millions of times allowed us to see the likelihood of turnout cascades and how many people a person could typically affect through her own behavior.
The results were very surprising. In some cases, one person's vote spread like wildfire, setting off a cascade of up to one hundred other people voting, even though people typically were directly connected to only three or four other people. On average, one decision to vote would motivate about three other people to go to the polls. Moreover, because liberals tend to associate with liberals and conservatives with conservatives, these cascades would yield sizable increases in the number of people voting the same way. Most of the time, one person's vote turned into two or more additional votes for their favorite candidate. So it seems that the more polarized we become by befriending only people with similar ideologies, the more motivated we are to participate in politics. This certainly creates a dilemma for people who think polarization is bad and voter turnout is good.
Interestingly, the total number of people voting had virtually no effect on how far the cascades would spread in our computer model. We originally believed that the size of turnout cascades would be bigger in larger populations because of the increased number of people who might be influenced. Instead, we discovered that turnout cascades are primarily local phenomena, occurring in small parts of the population within a few degrees of separation from each individual. As our Three Degrees of Influence Rule suggests, the power of one individual to influence many is limited by the effect of competing waves of influence that emanate from everyone else in the network.
Turnout in the Real World
People usually wonder whether computer models like this have meaning in the real world. No one has ever witnessed a turnout cascade, so how can we prove that they exist? Maybe they are just a figment of the modeler's imagination.
Many results from the model made sense and were already well established. The more often you ask someone to vote, the more likely it is she will vote. This is not surprising. What we needed was an important counterintuitive result that we could verify in the data. And, in fact, one prediction made by the computer model was very subtle and had never before been considered by political scientists. The model suggested that cascades would be largest if they emanated from someone who was in a moderately transitive group (that is, a group where people's friends know each other). Too much transitivity would mean the group was cut off from the rest of the world, and too little transitivity would mean the group was too disorganized to reinforce its own members' behavior. People might not know exactly how all their friends are connected, but they probably do have a sense of whether they might be able to reach people beyond their own group.
Hence, if there is a sweet spot for producing voting cascades, then we should expect people in that spot in real life to actually be more likely to vote because they are in a better position to influence many other people to follow suit. By the same reasoning we should expect the same people to be more likely to try to persuade others to vote. As it turns out, this is exactly what we found in the Indianapolis and St. Louis data. The people who were most likely to vote were those with transitivity of about 0.5 (meaning that half their friends are friends with one another). People whose friends did not know one another participated less, but so did those in tightly knit cliques of friends. And we recently confirmed these results and found exactly the same effects in a nationwide Gallup survey of networks and voting behavior.
These findings contradict some of the core recommendations made by political scientist Robert Putnam and his colleagues who study the effect of "social capital" on the health of our democracy. Putnam argues that highly clustered network ties improve information flow and increase reciprocity at a societal level because everyone is looking out for everyone else. In other words, more tightly knit connections are better for society. However, our work shows that, at a certain point, networks can become so transitive that norms and information simply circulate within groups rather than traveling between them. Like Brian Uzzi's groups of scientists and Broadway musical producers that we discussed in chapter 5, democratic citizens work best in "small worlds" where some of our friends know one another and others do not.
While our computer model provided some of the first indirect evidence that turnout cascades are real, direct evidence was not far behind. In 2006, Notre dame political scientist David Nickerson traveled to neighborhoods in Denver, Colorado, and Minneapolis, Minnesota, to conduct a novel experimental study of voter turnout. In this study, experimenters walked door-to-door to contact people who lived in two-person households. Each of these households was randomly assigned to receive a "treatment" or a "control" message. In the treatment, the experimenter encouraged the person who answered the door to vote at an upcoming election. In the control, the experimenter encouraged the practice of recycling. Nickerson noted who came to the door to speak to the experimenter, and then waited until after the election to look up who had voted and who had not.
Voter-contact studies are very common, and it is well established that get-out-the-vote campaigns actually work. So it was not surprising that the people in the Denver and Minneapolis who answered the door and heard the plea to vote were about 10 percent more likely to turn out than those who heard the plea to recycle. The big surprise, however, was in the behavior of the people who did not answer the door. As it turns out, the other person in the household was about 6 percent more likely to vote. In other words, 60 percent of the effect on the person who answered the door was passed on to the person who did not answer the door.
Consider for a moment how these indirect effects might flow through a whole network. Nickerson's creative study showed that a single plea to vote can change political behavior and spread from the experimenter to the person who heard the get-out-the-vote message to a person who neither heard the message nor met the experimenter. But why would it stop there? The person who didn't answer the door might pass the effect on to her friends and family as well. The effect probably won't be as strong when it gets passed along; as in the game of telephone, the get-out-the-vote message might get diluted along the way as it passes from person to person. But suppose that the effect decreases the same way between every pair of people, going from a full effect to 60 percent at every step. If the first person is 10 percent more likely to vote and the second person is 6 percent more likely to vote, then the third person would be 3.6 percent more likely to vote, the fourth person would be 2.16 percent more likely to vote, and so on.
That may not seem like much change, but remember that while the size of the contagious effect decreases at each step, the number of people affected increases exponentially at each step. In a world where every friend has only two other friends, there might be only two people who become 10 percent more likely to vote, but there will be four more who are 6 percent more likely, 8 who are 3.6 percent more likely, sixteen who are 2.16 more likely, and so on. Add all those up for a city about the size of Denver or Minneapolis, and the result is that a single appeal to vote could cause about thirty extra people to go to the polls. And if you make an appeal to about three dozen people, suddenly you can get an extra thousand to go to the polls*.
Of course, in real social networks, we tend to have more than two friends, and this increases the number of people who are close enough to us to be strongly affected by our actions. Yet, as we have noted, many of our friends already know one another, which means the effect might bounce around between the same people and never reach others who are socially distant to us. Also, the message may decay more rapidly than Nickerson found. It's hard to say which of these features of real-world social networks would dominate, but Nickerson's study gives us a taste of the potentially large cascade that could result from our personal decision to cast a vote.
Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Live. Christakis and Fowler, p. 174-180, 184-190.
*This Is Why Females And Blacks Should Never Have Been Given The Right To Vote - They Influence Other Females And Blacks To Vote And They All Vote As A Liberal Bloc And What Does Liberalism Do To A Country? Degrades It. It Makes Society More Socialist, Feminist, Multiculturalist, Sexually Promiscuous, And Divided (Economically Divided, Socially Divided, Racially Divided, Etc.).
It's well-known that immigrants to the U.S. today tend to vote Democratic and hold more left-wing beliefs than natives.
Mark Jackson
