For everyone who’s about to sit at the Thanksgiving table and is dreading a conversation about politics, here’s a non-partisan topic to go with your turkey.
In less than a year, the United States will be voting for the next President. Although we all have different political ideologies and candidate preferences, we still share a commonality; casting a ballot.
Everyone has a certain motivation to go vote. But does it matter? Do political parties benefit by the kind of voters we are? How does it impact our voting consistency? Many of us have heard people say that they’ll begrudgingly vote for a candidate, but disdainful votes aren’t worth less than enthusiastic ones. Or are they?
In political science, the motivations for voting can be categorized as either instrumental or expressive. Instrumental voting is that in which people vote for specific issues and to accomplish certain goals in government. For example, instrumental voters can be voting based on taxes or reproductive rights. On the contrary, expressive voting is more heavily based on party affiliation. In this case, a voter may vote for a candidate simply because they are a Democrat or Republican. Instrumental and expressive voting are not mutually exclusive, in fact, most voters are a hybrid of both types. I’ve found it interesting that this concept is not exclusive to voting but is used to describe reasons to acquire a second language as well. In this case, an instrumental reason to learn a second language may be to graduate or get a job, while an expressive reason would be learning about the culture and enjoying the language. In linguistics, it is considered that expressive motivations to learn a language are much more productive for effectively learning a language. If an expressive motivation to learn a language is stronger, does the same logic apply to voting? If so, then political parties should prefer to have more expressive voters.
But is that something that we should want as a democratic society? If we vote in accordance with party identity more heavily than on political issues, will we, the voters, be satisfied with the consequences? If the same linguistic concept were translated to voting we would also have to consider voter turnout. Since those who are acquiring a second language for instrumental reasons are typically less motivated and less successful, then we’d have to hold voters to that same standard. As a result, we could assume that issue-based voters are less motivated to vote or may fail to vote altogether. While we may consider that issue-based voting is a better strategy for fairer representation in policy and representatives, if there are fewer votes being cast there would be less representation in elected officials and policy propositions. Optimistically, I feel that there should be a happy middle ground. A perfectly balanced hybrid voter that values party affiliation and political issues.
On a more painfully realistic note, these kinds of voters probably don’t exist. Even if they did, every voter’s geographic situation makes the worth of their vote change. On a national scale, is it even worth voting in a state like California or South Dakota? Although the numeric value based on the electoral college may make a vote in a rural state absurdly large, the margin by which certain parties win is big enough so that your vote doesn’t really matter there either. At that rate, the only state where one could claim that your individual vote matters, on a national scale, would be in swing states. Maybe that’s why Pres Trump is officially moving to Florida. At that rate, would our intrinsic motivation to vote or not change if we knew our vote wouldn’t change anything? In this case, would more people vote for third party candidates in solid red/blue states or in Florida? Judging by the 25,000 people who voted for write-in candidates for President in the 2016 election in Florida, I would guess not. So why do we vote? And does our reason actually matter?
Want to see more HCFSU? Be sure to like us on Facebook and follow us on Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest!