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Vindicating Anthony Downs

Positive turnout rates in the United States and elsewhere are widely considered “an embarrassing limitation of the economic approach to politics” because, for any one voter, “the costs of casting a ballot in any large election are almost always greater than the potential benefits, which are dependent on the unlikely occurrence of casting the winning or tie vote in an election” (Knack 1992, 133). Green and Shapiro (1994), whose scathing critique of the rational choice field centers on the work of Anthony Downs (1957), trenchantly put it: “Rational choice theorists have trotted out an astonishing variety of conjectures about the costs and benefits of voting, in the process generating an enormous literature, possibly larger in terms of academic citations and sheer bibliographic length than any other rational choice literature in American politics” (47–48), yet they still have no answer as to why people vote when, according to their arguments, reason says they ought not. Grofman (1993), paraphrasing Morris Fiorina, has referred to the failure of rational choice theory to explain turnout as the “paradox that ate rational choice.”We are indebted to Clover Behrend-Gethard for bibliographic assistance.