Voter apathy taking toll on democracy
Barring catastrophe, Canadians will head to the polls in 2015. This election will be an exciting one with a potentially unpredictable three-way race. But it will also be interesting from a historical perspective as 2015 is a year marked by numerous democratically significant anniversaries. These include the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta and the 750th anniversary of the first Westminster parliament, the parliament from which our own is directly descended.
Thus, 2015 seems an ideal year to celebrate one of our national treasures, namely parliamentary democracy. Disappointingly, Canadians will almost certainly commemorate these events by disengaging from politics in greater numbers than ever before.
This is not really news. Everyone knows that voter turnout is low and declining. But the sky hasn’t fallen yet, so who really cares?
Sadly, not many. But more people should care, because low voter turnout actually produces — even encourages — bad government. Here’s why:
While humans are certainly capable of altruism, we primarily look out for ourselves and those we care about. Regardless of whether this is good or bad, it’s natural and how most of us behave, most of the time.
The result of this natural tendency is that, when given a chance to govern, people usually continue behaving this way. Dictatorships provide clear examples: Dictators’ main preoccupations are to retain power and enrich themselves and their families. They accomplish this by buying off those whose support they need to retain power — a group of people academics call the “selectorate.” This is usually easy because dictators can funnel the resources of the entire state into providing the bribes required to keep the military brass or ruling party happy — while leaving the less favoured out in the cold.
Democracy has its origins in efforts to tame this inequity. Democratic leaders must appeal to a much larger selectorate to retain power than must dictators. Indeed, democratic selectorates theoretically consist of a majority of the electorate. With many more people demanding benefits, democratic leaders must use the state’s limited resources much more efficiently than dictators and do so by investing in “public goods” (things that everyone can use like roads and hospitals) instead of “private goods” (things like fancy cars that only benefit the dictator’s lackeys).
Of course, no system is perfect. Given scarce resources even democratic governments must make decisions that create winners and losers. Democratic political parties recognize that their decisions and promises need to produce enough winners that they will be sufficiently appeal- ing to enough voters to win the next election. Theoretically, this produces a relatively good result policy-wise because the winning party/coalition needs to win the approval of 50% + 1 of voters. And while this is not perfect, especially for the losing 50% -1, it is fairer than if the party with less support wins, because the resulting policies should benefit at least the majority of voters.
The problem with low voter turn- out, however, is that it messes up this theoretical equation. When fewer people vote, it becomes less certain that the winning party actually represents the interests of the majority of the governed and thus, by extension, less clear that the policies being chosen actually have majority support.
Even more problematic is that even though voters still slightly outnumber nonvoters in Canada, these voters are becoming less representative of the population as a whole. For example, young people vote at a much lower rate (40%) than old people (80%). Regardless of why this is, it encourages parties to ignore issues important to young people while splurging on seniors.
Additionally, consider that: ❚Because we have more than two parties, many seats are won with less than 50% of the vote; ❚Voters who actually need government the most (e.g. the poor) vote at a disproportionately lower rate; and ❚Parties’ possess increasingly sophisticated abilities to micro-target critical swing voters.
These and other factors have combined to create a dramatically shrunken selectorate — that is the group of people whose support parties actually need in order to win elections. And when this happens, parties face strong incentives to focus on these swing voters by making promises to provide them with what are increasingly private goods instead of investing in more efficient and beneficial, but less individually compelling and targetable, public goods.
This is not meant to sound alarmist. Canada is not a dictatorship and won’t become one anytime soon. But our selectorate is shrinking worryingly and those who aren’t in it are being increasingly ignored. In a world of scarce resources we’d get much better results overall if our parties focused on providing public goods. Unfortunately, our system is increasingly incentivizing the opposite. And by further shrinking the selectorate, declining voter turnout is only making things worse.
Voters who actually need government the most (e.g. the poor) vote at a disproportionately lower rate