The nonparadox of voting

For a long time, I've been irked by the often-repeated economic "paradox" of voter behavior. Since an individual vote is very unlikely to affect the outcome of any election, the story goes, it is irrational for people to take the trouble to vote. This argument has been propounded time and again by such popular economists as Steve Levitt, among countless others.

But this is neither a sensical notion of human motivation nor a particularly economic one. Preferring to cast a vote rather than abstain does not violate the fundamental axioms of economic behavior any more than preferring pistachio to vanilla ice cream. Yet economists continue to waste ink over why such behavior persists.

The answer, to me, has always been simple. Culture and our moral upbringing simply instills in most of us a preference for voting which makes us feel good for contributing to the public good. And recently, serious researchers have finally demonstrated this commonsense principal in experimental data. Hopefully this study and future ones along this vein will once and for all put the thoroughly non-paradoxical "Voter's paradox" to rest so we can focus on more important matters.