The Importance of Political Competition

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If it were really true that voters only cared about results and they threw politicians out if the results were bad, then I think there's a good reason to be optimistic about political competition. However, suppose that voters also care a lot about policies. Do you mean policies rather than personal? Yes, not the results. They want a politician who favors prohibition of drugs. That is at least partly the basis on which they evaluate them. But if there's a politician who gets the murder rate down while legalizing drugs, it is likely that voters are going to throw him out because they don't like the policy.

Bryan Caplan, of George Mason University and blogger at EconLog, talks about his book, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies. Caplan argues that democracies work well in giving voters what they want but unfortunately, what voters want isn't particularly wise, especially when it comes to economic policy. He outlines a series of systematic biases we often have on economic topics and explains why we have little or no incentive to improve our understanding of the world and vote wisely. So, it's not special interests that are messing things up but the very incentives that lie at the heart of a vote-based system. This is a disturbing and provocative lens for viewing political outcomes.