Rationality Not Morality Should Drive Voters to the Polls

Bosnian voters will head to their tenth general elections since the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement on October 4. The past four years have been some of the most difficult since the war, and rarely has there been greater urgency in reshuffling key positions within the country’s administrative apparatus – especially within the security sector. Unusually, these Bosnian elections are also coinciding with potentially historic elections in neighboring Serbia, and the highly anticipated U.S. mid-terms. Even the concurrent elections in Israel may influence the overall political situation in the country.

Ovaj članak dostupan je i na bosanskom jeziku

In short, by early November, leaders and citizens alike in Bosnia may be faced with a dramatically different local, regional, and global political climate. Depending on the outcome of the vote in Bosnia specifically those new circumstances could either be an opportunity for the country or mark the onset of a major and protracted crisis.

Bosnia’s highly polarized and partisan media have made their respective preferences clear. Social media is awash with party-aligned bots and trolls, and the candidates themselves have produced an extraordinary amount of content; little of it thoughtful or inspiring.

Still, it would be unfair to suggest that the only problem in Bosnian democratic life are the media or the politicians. Elections are the chief dynamo of representative democracy but even so they are poorly understood by much of the voting public, in Bosnia as much as in America. Why? Because so many people, falsely, believe voting to be a moral act, or a moral obligation. Neither is true.

What is politics? The American political scientist Harold Lasswell explained that it was the process whereby a group of people decides who gets what, when, and how. Representative democracies determine the distribution of social and political goods based on regular, popular elections, which then grant the elected officials’ authority and responsibility to facilitate said processes of distribution.

Questions of morality and justice may, and often do, become election issues. Same-sex marriage, abortion, the death penalty, the limits and precise contours of what constitutes free speech, these are all examples of morally tinged issues that have been variously contested in recent elections in Europe and the Americas. That moral issues may be contested through the ballot box, however, does not mean that the democratic process itself is a moral one. The democratic process is simply the mechanism by which we choose the delegates and representatives that will determine who among us will get what, when, and how.

That mechanism is, in turn, limited. It is limited to what is available to us, as voters. We may dislike all the available choices. We may dispute whether an issue should even be put to a vote, for example, as in the case of various referenda. But in a representative democracy the act of voting is an intentionally limited mechanism. Those of us who wish to go beyond its limits can, and should, participate in the broader democratic process; becoming active in parties and social movements, advocacy, and community organizing. But even when we do, all citizens arrive at the same terminus, eventually. A ballot, with limited choices, from which we must decide the preferable course.

At this point, the act of voting is primarily a rational one, not a moral one. Some will insist that because there are negative aspects to each of the available candidates, all available choices are functionally the same, i.e. equally bad, and that therefore the only moral choice is not to vote. This again, however, is merely an attempt to impose a moral framework on a fundamentally amoral process. It is to answer the question of “who gets what, when, and how?” by saying “I want others to make the choice for me”.

Mind you, not voting is not necessarily irrational either. There are instances in which mass boycotts of the electoral process have achieved certain niche, typically symbolic victories. But that is a tactic of organized civil disobedience, very much in conversation with Laswell’s maxim, and thus distinct from individualized acts of what we might term democratic abstinence. This latter phenomenon is at issue in places like Bosnia, where the turnout at the 2024 municipal elections was 45% and achieved nothing. It achieved nothing because there was no movement to make a demand of any sort; it was merely many individual instances of choosing to abdicate one’s rights.

While there may be religious traditions in which abdicating one’s rights – acts of sacrifice, in effect – are considered righteous, there is no faith in which disillusionment is considered virtuous, much less rational. Nor is there any major secular philosophical tradition which asserts that view. Persistent disillusionment may, in fact, only be an expression of untreated mental illness, or trauma.

The latter is, almost certainly, the case in Bosnia. Large scale non-participation in the political and democratic process as an expression of likewise widespread social trauma. Whether the origins of that trauma are in the war or in the inequity of the postwar period, or a combination of the two, is irrelevant. What is relevant is that the expression of that trauma is irrational. Because the source of the trauma in the first place – whether it is the war, or the post-war period – is not ‘politics’ or ‘democracy,’ however loosely defined, it is the inability and/or disinterest of the Bosnian public to engage in the same.

In other words, if Bosnians – or Americans, or Brits, or Japanese – wish for different, better outcomes from their democratic processes, they must participate. Because representative democracy is a machine which requires inputs to produce outputs. The quality and depth of the input determine the outcomes. The more people participate, the better the outcomes – not necessarily in any electoral cycle, but certainly in the aggregate.

A simple way to show is by observing the relationship between popular democratic figures of the past, and electoral turnout. The 1935 British elections which eventually resulted in Winston Churchill becoming Prime Minister had a turnout of 71%. When he was re-elected in 1951, the

turnout was 82%. The 1960 U.S. presidential election which resulted in John F. Kennedy’s victory over Richard Nixon had a turnout of just under 64%. Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020 on a turnout of 66%, the largest such figure on record in American history. Charles de Gaulle won France’s fist direct presidential elections in 1965 with a final turnout of 84%.

The point is simple. When citizens participate, consistently, in the electoral and democratic process, the outcomes are generally better. Largely because greater participation creates a natural selection process which elevates better candidates, who are forced to appeal to greater segments of the electorate. As participation and turnout dips, in turn, the easier it is for lower quality candidates with fringe agendas to succeed.

In sum, moralistic narratives with respect to voting and democracy only muddy our thinking. If voters want better outcomes – a better means for determining who gets what, when, and how – they need to provide the inputs necessary for the democratic machine to produce as such. They need to, at minimum, participate. If they fail to do so, the result is, as the comedian George Carlin quipped, “garbage in, garbage out”.