THE CALCULUS OF VOTING RECONSIDERED

Abstract

A rational economic hypothesis of the citizen's decision to vote or not vote in U. S. presidential elections has been cited as an example of the replacement of social-psychologically oriented “empirical generalizations” by axiomatically based deductive propositions in political science. However, close scrutiny shows that the rational (or political) economic paradigm is no more accurate a theory than previously popular systems analysis or functional paradigms. The claimed verification of the original hypothesis was based on an apparently imprecise, adhoc, ordinal procedure that could not distinguish between the intimately related rational economic and social-psychological hypotheses. A more powerful technique resolves the issue in favor of the latter model for the data used by the original authors.