komponisto comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011) - Less Wrong

42 Post author: orthonormal 12 August 2010 01:08AM

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Comment author: komponisto 14 August 2011 05:23:09PM *  4 points [-]

Do you think that it's generally better for voter turnout to be high than low?

If not, that would seem to be inconsistent with a desire for the US to continue being fairly politically stable

This is a non-sequitur, despite its status as cached wisdom.

I see no reason to expect that higher voter turnout implies greater political stability. In fact, my intuition is exactly the opposite: assuming a genuine freedom to vote, low turnout is a marker of stability, since it signals that voters don't much care who wins, which suggests that not much of importance depends on the outcome. You wouldn't want to live in a country where it really, truly mattered who won an election.

Furthermore, the political class has a transparent interest in spreading the meme that high voter turnout is good, since a faction that wins an election with high turnout has a greater mandate to assume more power.

Comment author: DSimon 14 August 2011 05:54:23PM *  2 points [-]

I see no reason to expect that higher voter turnout implies greater political stability. In fact, my intuition is exactly the opposite: assuming a genuine freedom to vote, low turnout is a marker of stability, since it signals that voters don't much care who wins, which suggests that not much of importance depends on the outcome.

This is a really good point, so I'm withdrawing my statement about stability.

To pick another standard meme, what about popular involvement in the political process as a way of promoting just policies over unjust? That is, by unjust policies I mean policies that provide insufficient benefits to people who have little power. This is a separate question from stability, as a stable government can still have extremely unjust policies (or vice versa, though I can't think of examples as easily).

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