Pretend that you are a loyal customer to a neighborhood shop called Abner’s Bakery. You have bought your bread and a few other goods from Abner’s several times a week for the past twenty years. Initially, you shopped there because it was nearby, you liked Abner (its charming owner who baked everything fresh daily with help from his wife and two adult children), and, most of all, you preferred fresh baked bread to the pre-packaged stuff they sell in the supermarkets.
Abner retired ten years ago. He sold the store to Helen, who has kept the name and location but changed about everything else. Not only is Helen’s staff not very friendly, they do not bake any bread. Odd for a “bakery,” but Helen bought the store to take advantage of Abner’s loyal customer base – in the same way that she has turned local bakeries into manufactured bread shops all over the city. By selling the same pre-packaged stuff as the supermarket, Helen can sell bread—lower quality bread—at lower prices than when Abner owned the shop while making more profit on each sale. Plus, the price change has attracted more customers who would otherwise have purchased bread from the supermarket, increasing the total number of sales.
You, like all of Abner’s old customers, do not like Helen, her staff, or her bread. Nevertheless, you all keep buying your bread there. You sometimes complain to Helen, but Helen makes too much money with relatively little effort to change. Over the last ten years, a few other bakeries have popped up in the neighborhood – started by former customers of Abner’s, in fact, aware that there still was a strong demand for fresh baked bread in the neighborhood. When each new bakery opened, you toyed with the idea of trying it out; but old habits die hard. Plus, you are not sure that the neighborhood can support two bakeries. If you switch, you rationalized, they may both fail and then you would have to shop at the supermarket (anything but that!). Thus, you have continued shopping at Abner’s hoping your complaints will someday be heard. None of the new bakeries lasted more than a year.
******
If you and the other customers of Abner’s Bakery who want fresh bread had switched to a new shop, it would certainly have survived. You would have had fresh bread again, as well as another friendly neighborhood owner. Seemingly, all would have been well. But that’s not what happened. You continued shopping at Helen’s even though she ignores your complaints about the bread, which you do not even like. Why would she change? The lower quality bread she sells, the more profit she makes by adding new customers; and thanks to loyal old Abner’s folks like you, she doesn’t lose any.
It is clear that in this situation, your behavior would encourage Helen to continue selling cheap, pre-packaged, low quality bread products because it increases her profits, and prevent the emergence of any preferable alternative to Helen’s shop because the new bakeries cannot survive without customers. Thus, you ensure your own perpetual disappointment.
The Abner’s scenario should border on the absurd because common sense tells you not to buy what you do not want when there are better, affordable options. In fact, that is basically the underlying assumption of our prevailing market ideology: Demand determines which products succeed, and competition for demand ensures that the market produces high quality goods at fair prices. But that assumes rational customers, and Abner’s customers clearly behaved irrationally.
Although you would never expect to see people act like the customers who wanted fresh bread in the marketplace, their behavior mirrors nearly everyone’s voting behavior. Obviously, markets do not correspond perfectly with our electoral system; yet neither are the two so distinct that they do not share obvious parallels. For example, if you continually buy bad products from a profit-seeking company, you should not expect it to offer a higher quality product that will decrease its profitability. On the other hand, if you stop buying its products, you help create an incentive for the company to improve its products. Likewise, if you vote for a vote-seeking organization—that is, a political party—even as it supports policies with which you do not agree so that it can capture other voters, you should have no reasonable expectation that it will turn around and fulfill your desires that you allegedly favor when outside of the voting booth.
If you are like the vast majority of Americans who are dissatisfied with elected officials (polling showed dissatisfaction at record highs at the end of 2011), you probably vote for a Democrat or Republican reflexively despite the laws they repeatedly enact that undeniably favor elites. To come back around, these dissatisfied voters are getting exactly what they asked for at the place where their voice matters most: the ballot box. As with the neighborhood bakeries, no effective alternative to the Democrats and Republicans will emerge without voter support, and the Democrats and Republicans will not stop serving elite interests unless people impose a cost on them for doing so with their votes. This can be put more simply in one of two ways: People will not get change unless they vote for change (sound familiar?); or, if people vote for the elitist status quo, they will get the elitist status quo.
UPDATE: Perhaps the reason that American voters treat voting and buying bread (or the like) asymmetrically is that, in the latter, a person can go to one of several shops and supermarkets, select the particular loaf he wants at a particular price, and take it home after purchase. Therefore, he knows exactly what he will get when he decides (his own decision determines the outcome). This aspect is in sharp contrast with voting, where a person’s choice often represents something of a leap of faith. Her vote alone cannot decide the result. A voter needs “partners” to augment the influence of her vote. Unlike a business partnership in which the parties are known and rights memorialized in contract, however, a voter will not know ahead of time exactly who will vote or for whom.
This dissemblance does not negate the analogy, but it does make people’s vain fidelity to the major parties more understandable. Everyone agrees that voters maximize their electoral power by voting in coalitions, and the prevailing voting strategy seeks to take advantage of this. Each person wants his vote to “matter,” so nearly all voters in the United States decide to join one of the dominant, pre-existing coalitions by voting for a Democrat or Republican candidate. This rationale assumes that votes only matter when they help a candidate win—or cause a candidate to lose—a particular election. Thus, most American voters completely disregard any effect of their votes when deciding, except for how it will impact the result of upcoming election.
Comments are closed.