When citizens should not vote

Given we have an election coming up, as they do in the US, all publicly-minded people out there should register to vote and be ready to head off to the polls on election day, right? Well, maybe not.

On Free Will this week, Will Wilkinson interviews Brown philosopher Jason Brennan, about his forthcoming paper, “Polluting the Polls: When Citizens Should Not Vote” [rtf]. Wilkinson notes that Brennan's argument is simple and compelling. Wilkinson writes

People should be public-spirited, and act with the common good in mind. When enough people vote badly–from ignorance or bias, for example–the result is often bad policy. The quality of policy matters to the public good. Higher-quality democratic decisions, and better policy, can be secured if bad voters choose to abstain. Because the personal cost of not voting badly is so low, a public-spirited person shouldn’t do it. And it seems that a lot of people are quite likely to vote badly. So there are many people who, if they care about the common good, ought to choose not to vote.