The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

by Bryan Caplan

The broken clock of the SIVH is right twice a day. It fails for party identification, Social Security, Medicare, abortion, job programs, national health insurance, Vietnam, and the draft. But it works tolerably well for a few scattered issues.32 You might expect to see the exceptions on big questions with a lot of money at stake, but the truth is almost the reverse. The SIVH shines brightest on the banal issue of smoking. Donald Green and Ann Gerken find that smokers and nonsmokers are ideologically and demographically similar, but smokers are a lot more opposed to restrictions and taxes on their favorite vice.33 Belief in “smokers’ rights” cleanly rises with daily cigarette consumption: fully 61.5% of “heavy” smokers want laxer antismoking policies, but only 13.9% of people who “never smoked” agree. If the SIVH were true, comparable patterns of belief would be everywhere. They are not.