Memetics & Voting: How Nature May Make us Public Spirited
Working Paper No. 05-W14
John P. Conley and Myrna Wooders
ABSTRACT [article]
We consider the classic puzzle of why people turn out for
elections in substantial numbers even though formal analysis
strongly suggests that rational agents would not vote. If one
assumes that voters do not make systematic mistakes, the most
plausible explanation seems to be that agents receive a warm glow
from the act of voting itself. However, this begs the question of why
agents feel a warm glow from participating in the electoral process in the first
place. We approach this question from an memetic standpoint. More specifically, we consider a model in which social norms, ideas, values, or more generally, "memes" influence the behavior of groups of agents, and in turn, induce a kind of competition between value systems. We show
for a range of situations that groups with a more public-spirited social norm have
an advantage over groups that are not as public-spirited.
We also explore conditions under which the altruistic behavior
resulting from public-spiritedness is disadvantageous.
The details depend on the costs of voting, the extent to which
different types of citizens agree or disagree over the benefits of various public
policies, and the relative proportions of various preference types
in the population. We conclude that memetic evolution over social norms may be a force
that causes individuals to internalize the benefits that their actions
confer on others.
Keywords and Phrases: Memetics, evolution, voting, warm glow, civic duty, free riding, public choice, public goods
JEL Classification Numbers: C7, D7