Costs of Voting and Nonvoting

The decision to vote has been the subject of much formal modeling in recent years. Much of this literature appears to me to be using elephant guns to hunt fleas. My criticism concerns the cost of voting and consists of four major points: (1) the cost of voting has been tremendously exaggerated; (2)...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPublic choice Vol. 27; no. 1; pp. 115 - 119
Main Author Niemi, Richard G.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Leiden Virginia Polytechnic Institute 01.10.1976
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Budgets
Congressional elections
Costs
Democracy
Financial budgets
Local elections
Opportunity costs
Political parties
Polls
Presidential elections
Primaries & caucuses
Primary elections
School districts
Variable costs
Voter turnout
Voting
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ISSN0048-5829
1573-7101
DOI10.1007/BF01718955

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Summary:The decision to vote has been the subject of much formal modeling in recent years. Much of this literature appears to me to be using elephant guns to hunt fleas. My criticism concerns the cost of voting and consists of four major points: (1) the cost of voting has been tremendously exaggerated; (2) discussion of variability in the cost term has been directed at variation across individuals to the neglect of variation across elections; (3) the cost of not voting has been largely ignored; and (4) the "Olson" problem concerning the provision of a collective good has been exaggerated.
Bibliography:ObjectType-Article-1
SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
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ISSN:0048-5829
1573-7101
DOI:10.1007/BF01718955