Craig Ladwig on low voter turnout

My buddy, Craig Ladwig at Indiana Policy Review, weighed in with the following op-ed piece. It appeared in papers around the state, including the Jeff-NA Tribune. Good stuff!

This morning’s editorial in the Indianapolis Star asks an important and disturbing question: Why aren’t Hoosiers, even when faced with mounting government failure, showing up on election day? Economists know the answer, and the problem is more serious than mere apathy or the frustration of gerrymandered incumbency.

As odd as it may seem, low voter turnout and government failure go hand in hand in certain historical situations. And the phenomenon has an equally odd name, “rational ignorance.”

It occurs when government overreaches; that is, becomes so complex and detached citizens lose faith in their ability to influence it. That is when people make a rational decision that becoming better informed (and eventually voting) would be a waste of their time. It is in part why the old Soviet Union had to make not voting a capital offense.

“Voter knowledge and control of government will be much greater under a regime of strictly limited government power,” writes Ilya Somin of the Cato Institute. “It also leads to the counter-intuitive suggestion that the extension of government power to new areas of social life undercuts democratization rather than furthers it.”

In other words, to make democracy work best, i.e., to ensure a maximum number of informed voters, government’s scope must be narrowed. Dr. Cecil Bohanon, an economist at Ball State University, made that point several years ago in an article for the Indiana Policy Review entitled “The Nov. 7 Election: Don’t Get Your Hopes Up.” Bohanon organized his argument around Thomas Jefferson’s famous line, “. . . that the government that governs least governs best.”

“This is often taken, not without merit, as a libertarian motto for government to keep its hands off private choices,” Dr. Bohanon wrote. “But it also can be seen as a prescription for government to do a few tasks quite well.”

It all fits on a bumper sticker: “Fire a Bureaucrat, Encourage a Voter.”