The Calculus of Voting Reconsidered

Abstract

A rational economic hypothesis of the citizen's decision to vote or not vote in U. S. presidential elections has been cited as an example of the replacement of social-psychologically oriented “empirical generalizations” by axiomatically based deductive propositions in political science. However, close scrutiny shows that the rational (or political) economic paradigm is no more accurate a theory than previously popular systems analysis or functional paradigms. The claimed verification of the original hypothesis was based on an apparently imprecise, <it>adhoc</it>, ordinal procedure that could not distinguish between the intimately related rational economic and social-psychological hypotheses. A more powerful technique resolves the issue in favor of the latter model for the data used by the original authors.