Huge swaths of voters will passionately support the Republican or Democratic political tickets yet, when questioned or tested, be utterly incapable of explaining the specific mechanisms by which their party’s policies will create desirable outcomes, or even telling which policies are associated with which party.The markets are a powerful economic coordination mechanism. The fact that voters have extremely low levels of political information has been well documented for decades. The preferences they express are vague and oriented toward appealing to citizen feelings and emotions, but the preferences they act on are specific and well informed. The elite determine public policy, so their preferences are instrumental. While the elite want to be cautious about expressing specific policy preferences, they have good reason to be informed about policy alternatives and the expected consequences of implementing public policies. But though markets and politics can both have unequal distributions of transaction costs, this issue tends to be more severe in political systems by their very nature: Meaningful negotiation over policy being carried out by tens or hundreds of millions of individual citizens simply isn’t feasible. Well connected political insiders face low transaction costs in bargaining with each other over public policy. This uneven distribution of transaction costs exists in political systems as well. The value of resources is maximized for those who face low transaction costs – the steel mills and automobile producers – but not for those who face high transaction costs – the people who breath polluted air. As a result, the surrounding residents bear the external costs of breathing polluted air. Transactions costs are high enough to prevent a bargain from being struck. The tens of thousands of residents in the vicinity of the mills might be willing to bargain with steel mills to reduce their pollution if it were possible, but fashioning a bargain that would require tens of thousands of people to participate would be difficult. They face low transaction costs and can maximize the value of resources to themselves. Markets make it easy for those who want to buy steel to do so from those who want to sell steel. Unlike the typical voter, the political preferences of the elites will tend to be instrumental rather than expressive, because elites actually do influence outcomes in a way voters don’t: These are the elites – such as politicians, policymakers, bureaucrats, and lobbyists. There is another group of people in democratic political systems, who face different incentives and form their preferences in different ways. Someone may anchor on the identity of being a patriotic American, decide that the Republican party values patriotism more, and will then tend to adopt whatever the Republican party line is for most political issues – and if the official party line changes, they will change their opinion right along with it.īut this analysis so far focuses on the typical voter. Additionally, voter preferences tend to be anchored on a key point – a single issue, a political identity, party loyalty, a particular leader – and the vast majority of a given voter’s preference on political issues will be derived from that anchor. Because elections aggregate expressive preferences, not instrumental preferences, we cannot make valid inferences about the outcomes voters actually prefer by referencing election results.
Since casting a vote does not create an outcome, voters will tend to act expressively, not instrumentally, when casting their vote.
But expressive preferences and instrumental preferences are not always the same. To briefly recap, Holcombe argues that voters have both instrumental preferences, which are about the outcomes they prefer, and expressive preferences, which are about what voters prefer to express.
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