The Decision of Whether and How to Vote by Charles W. Baird Professor of Economics and Director of The Smith Center, California State University, Hayward.
Public choice is the branch of economics that focuses on the choices that people make in politics.
It uses principles of economics to explain what happens in the political marketplace. James Buchanan, at George Mason University, won the 1986 Nobel Prize in economics for his pioneering work in public choice theory. Here I want to use public choice theory to explain two troublesome phenomena in American politics - voter participation rates are very low, and those who do vote often do so without carefully weighing the merits of candidates and ballot measures. Somewhere around fifty percent of eligible voters choose not to vote in presidential elections. Many more choose not to vote in non-presidential elections, and in local elections the voter participation rate is typically less than thirty percent.