Chip Taylor

What do voters want?

Commenting on the same Sebastion Mallaby piece that I commented on earlier, Don Boudreaux points out that the outcome of the voting process isn't necessarily the desire of the voters:

[I]t’s an all-too-common mistake to infer that whatever government does in a democratic society is what “the people” – or even what “the voters” – want or like. A number of well-known public-choice reasons support the conclusion that what government often (typically?) does has only little connection with the genuine wishes of citizens or voters. See Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem, along with the work (among many others) of Anthony Downs, Jim Buchanan, Gordon Tullock, and George Stigler.

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The fact is, the vast majority of what government does is not known by the typical voter. Voters' actions in some ways enable government to do all that it does, but mostly what government does remains unknown to almost all voters. Therefore, how is it possible to claim that voters want or "like" big government if most of what big government does is unknown to most voters?

He's correct. However, I still think that most people want more government of some type and will put up with more government of other types in order to get what they want. But that is merely my empirically unconfirmed opinion.

But the public choice view of voting would appear to confirm my other main point -- that partisan political activity isn't a very effective way to work for smaller government.