Please don't vote because democracy is a local optimum

And voting adds legitimacy to it.

Thank you.

#annoyedbymotivatedcognition

And voting adds legitimacy to it.

Thank you.

#annoyedbymotivatedcognition

Does voting add legitimacy to a democracy? I've seen many people take it as a given (as Konkvistador does in this post), but I don't see why it is necessarily true.

In one sense competitive races with high turnout are legitimate in terms of "probably not stolen with corruption", and I agree that illegitimacy in the form of stolen elections can reduce turnout. But in another sense competitive races with high turnout are the least legitimate. They have the most controversy, the most regret, and the highest percentage of the public disliking the result and getting a turnover next race. In the US you get a spike of turnout in '92, then the Republican Revolution of '94, a spike of turnout in '04, then the democratic sweep of '06, Obama in '08 then the Tea Party takover in '10. These are not signs of a stable electorate that is happy with it's legitimate government. Just eyeballing a pair of 30 year graphs of "citizen satisfaction in the US government" and "voter turnout" seems pretty convincing to me that people go out to vote when they're most dissatisfied. Voter turnout thus seems to be a combination of dissatisfaction in government and a belief that you can change that government (which implies you don't like how it currently is).

For a hypothetical, which government do you think people are happiest with and consider the most legitimate...
a government where 90% of the population votes because they really want to get their side in power, and fuck those other guys... or a government where only 9% of the population votes because everybody is pretty indifferent between either party and don't consider it a big deal no matter who wins?
All things being equal (eg corruption level, education, etc) I'd assume people consider the second more legitimate. They are happy with how their government would turn out, and even though they could potentially have 10 times the voting impact, they choose not to exercise their right. By not-voting they aren't giving authority and legitimacy to rule to any one political party, but they are giving legitimacy to the system as a whole. They're saying that they trust the rest of the country to come to the right conclusion.

Anyhow I've gone astray. Why do you think that voting adds legitimacy to a democracy, rather than the opposite? I know I believed in that statement too, but frankly I think the only reason I believed it was because it was repeated so much. I would be interested in hearing the logic behind it, because at this point I can't remember why I used to believe it aside from repetition.

All things being equal (eg corruption level, education, etc) I'd assume people consider the second more legitimate. They are happy with how their government would turn out, and even though they could potentially have 10 times the voting impact, they choose not to exercise their right.

That's one possible reason why they might refrain from voting. They might also be unhappy with how their government would turn out whether they vote or not. In my experience, people who don't care about voting are much more likely to be disaffected ("they're all idiots... (read more)

14[anonymous]14y

Non-voting as a political strategy I would certainly vote for a candidate that could belivably promise to replace democracy with something I thought worked better. But since I know I'm biased against the strenght of the Humean small-c conserviative argument against change (because it doesn't make good insight porn ), I would require a very high standard of evidence. I don't think I'd vote for Moldbug's Neocamerialism as a replacement for my cozy Central European Parlimentary Social Democracy just yet for example. But consider that the high voter turn out happened in the examples you gave in a later comment because there where parties that promised fundamental change in the political system which included abolishing voting or changing its role in society. Without such an option casting your ballot is just demonstrating the system is working as intended. The overton window was not moved in those cases by the Demublican party moving slowly away from democracy year after year because it kept giving them more votes, but because of external change convicing people the old parties and the old system was lame. New parties arose who promised to change the system by which they arose (oh irony). But what if such new parties where illegal? And the laws enforced because people serving in the police forces or the benches still believe in democracy and saw those trying to work around them as scum? Eastern European referendums in the 1980s and 1990s had high turn out too. But I bet local party meetings or mayoral elections (yes Communist countries had elections too a whole lot of them) in late 1980s Eastern Europe weren't well attended. The governments of Eastern Europe weren't scared of people participating in government or unions or whatever, they where scared of people abandoing their insitutions for alternatives. General elections are more party meetings than referendums today. So ok where are we left? We have strong evidence that the obvious alternative (the one we where m

2TimS14y

I think you are confusing object level satisfaction and meta level satisfaction. Despite many policy disagreements throughout the years, the American people have agreed for about 150 years that the current form of government is the one that should govern. In other words, Americans want a participatory democracy/republic. Voting is an expression of support for that model - thus voting enhances the legitimacy of the current system. P.S. For cynics and public-choice theorists, I'm not arguing that the United States is a participatory democracy - that's a discussion for another time. I'm only explaining why the act of voting adds legitimacy to the current setup.

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Please don't vote because democracy is a local optimum

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Please don't vote because democracy is a local optimum

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