Difference between revisions of "Foot Voting"
(Created page with "Foot voting, also often called “voting with your feet” is the ability to choose government policies by deciding which jurisdiction to live in. The most often discussed typ...") |
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| '''BIBLIOGRAPHY:''' | | '''BIBLIOGRAPHY:''' | ||
| − | Samuel. J. Abrams and Morris P. Fiorina, “The ‘Big Sort’ that Wasn’t: A Skeptical Reexamination,” PS: Political Science and Politics (2009): 203-210; Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing us Apart (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008); Dawn Brancati, Peace by Design: Managing Intrastate Conflict Through Federalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); James Buchanan and Geoffrey Brennan, The Power to Tax: Analytical Foundations of a Fiscal Constitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Bryan Caplan, “Rational Ignorance vs. Rational Irrationality,” Kyklos 53 (2001): 3-21; Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957); Thomas R. Dye, American Federalism: Competition Among Governments (New York: John Wiley, 1990); Robert C. Ellickson, “Legal Sources of Residential Lock-Ins: Why French Households Move Half as Often as U.S. Households,” University of Illinois Law Review (2012): 373–404; Kirsten H. Engel, “State Environmental Standard-Setting: Is there a ‘Race’ and is it ‘to the Bottom,’ Hastings Law Journal 48 (1997): 274-369; Bruno Frey, “A Utopia? Government Without Territorial Monopoly,” Independent Review 6 (2001): 99-112; Bruno Frey, Happiness: A Revolution in Economics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008); Edward Glaeser, “Reforming Land Use Regulations,” | + | Samuel. J. Abrams and Morris P. Fiorina, “The ‘Big Sort’ that Wasn’t: A Skeptical Reexamination,” ''PS: Political Science and Politics'' (2009): 203-210; Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, ''Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Bill Bishop, ''The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing us Apart'' (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008); Dawn Brancati, ''Peace by Design: Managing Intrastate Conflict Through Federalism'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); James Buchanan and Geoffrey Brennan, ''The Power to Tax: Analytical Foundations of a Fiscal Constitution'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Bryan Caplan, “Rational Ignorance vs. Rational Irrationality,”'' Kyklos'' 53 (2001): 3-21; Bryan Caplan, ''The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies'' (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Anthony Downs, ''An Economic Theory of Democracy'' (New York: Harper & Row, 1957); Thomas R. Dye, ''American Federalism: Competition Among Governments'' (New York: John Wiley, 1990); Robert C. Ellickson, “Legal Sources of Residential Lock-Ins: Why French Households Move Half as Often as U.S. Households,” ''University of Illinois Law Review''' (2012): 373–404; Kirsten H. Engel, “State Environmental Standard-Setting: Is there a ‘Race’ and is it ‘to the Bottom,’ ''Hastings Law Journal'' 48 (1997): 274-369; Bruno Frey, “A Utopia? Government Without Territorial Monopoly,” ''Independent Review' 6 (2001): 99-112; Bruno Frey, ''Happiness: A Revolution in Economics'' (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008); Edward Glaeser, “Reforming Land Use Regulations,” ''Brookings Institution'' (2017), available at https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-land-use-regulations/amp/; Wallace Oates, “Fiscal Competition or Harmonization? Some Reflections,” ''National Tax Journal'' vol. LIV, no. 3 (2001): 507-512; Paul E. Peterson, ''The Price of Federalism'' (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995); William Riker, ''Federalism: Origins, Operation, Significance'' (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964); Richard Revesz, “Rehabilitating Interstate Competition: Rethinking the ‘Race to the Bottom’ Rationale for Federal Environmental Regulation,” ''NYU Law Review'' 67 (1992): 1210-54; Richard Revesz, “The Race to the Bottom and Federal Environmental Regulation: A Response To Critics,” ''Minnesota Law Review'' 82 (1997); Todd Sandler, ''Global Collective Action'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); David Schleicher, “Stuck!, The Law and Economics of Residential Stability,” ''Yale Law Journal'' 127 (2017): 78-154; Marc Schneiberg and Tim Bartley, “Organizations, Regulation, and Economic Behavior: Regulatory Dynamics and Forms from the Nineteenth to Twenty-First Century,” ''Annual Review of Law and Social Science'' 4 (2008): 31-61; Ilya Somin, “Foot Voting, Decentralization, and Development,” ''Minnesota Law Review'' 102 (2017): 1649-70; Ilya Somin, ''Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter'' (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2nd ed., 2016); Ilya Somin, “Rational Ignorance,” in ''Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies'', ed. by Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey (London: Routledge, 2015); Ilya Somin, “Foot Voting, Federalism, and Political Freedom,” in ''Nomos: Federalism and Subsidiarity'', ed. by J. Fleming and J. Levy (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Ilya Somin, “Federalism and Property Rights,” ''University of Chicago Legal Forum'' (2011): 53-88; Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf, “Assessing the Importance of Tiebout Sorting: Local Heterogeneity from 1885 to 1990,” ''American Economic Review'' 93 (2003):1648–77; Robert S. Taylor, ''Exit Left: Markets and Mobility in Republican Thought'' (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Charles Tiebout, “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures,” ''Journal of Political Economy'' 64 (1956): 516-24; Barry Weingast, “The Economic Role of Political Institutions: Market-Preserving Federalism and Economic Development,” ''Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization'' 11 (1995):1-31. |
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==== Ilya Somin ==== | ==== Ilya Somin ==== | ||
Last updated: September 2018 | Last updated: September 2018 | ||
Latest revision as of 01:51, 26 September 2018
Foot voting, also often called “voting with your feet” is the ability to choose government policies by deciding which jurisdiction to live in. The most often discussed type of foot voting is jurisdictional choice within a federal system, by means of which people can decide to move to a regional or local government whose policies they prefer to the available alternatives. But foot voting is also possible between private organizations, such as private planned communities, and through international migration (Somin 2014).
Foot voting has many potential advantages. The most obvious is that it enables better matching between residents and policies than is available through conventional ballot box voting and centralized government alone As Charles Tiebout (1956), showed in a classic article, if there is a wide range of available jurisdictions and moving costs are low enough, each person can potentially seek out a jurisdiction that has the optimal mix of policies, given his or her preferences.
Another potentially crucial advantage of foot voting is that it enables participants to make individually decisive choices about the policies they wish to live under, unlike in the case of conventional ballot box voting, where each individual voter usually has only an infinitesimally small chance of affecting the outcome. This allows foot voting to considerably enhance political freedom (Somin 2014), and individual liberty generally (Taylor 2017).
Foot voting can also enable individuals to make better-informed political choices than is usually the case with ballot box voting. Because an individual vote in an election has so little chance of changing the result, voters tend to be “rationally ignorant” about government and public policy (Downs 1957; Somin 2015), and studies consistently show very low levels of political knowledge. Ballot box voters also have little incentive to objectively evaluate the information they do learn, and try to avoid cognitive biases (Caplan 2001, 2007). By contrast, foot voters’ decisions generally have a high chance of affecting the policies they live under, which leads foot voters to seek out more information and evaluate it more objectively than ballot box voters do (Somin 2016, ch. 5).
The effectiveness of foot voting is enhanced when jurisdictions have incentives to compete with each other for residents (Dye 1990; Buchanan and Brennan 1980; Somin 2014). In that, they attempt to offer policies that are attractive to new residents, and keep current ones from leaving. Such competition can be fostered by, among other things, requiring subnational jurisdictions to raise all or most of their funds by taxing their own residents, as opposed to relying on grants from the central government (Weingast 1995).
Migration combined with competition between jurisdictions can also serve to promote economic development by creating incentives for effective development policies and enabling workers to move to areas where they will be more productive (Somin 2017; Weingast 1995).
In addition to important advantages, foot voting also has a variety of possible limitations and downsides. The most obvious is the problem of moving costs. For many people, foot voting may be difficult or impossible because of the costs involved. These include not only the immediate costs of moving people and property, but indirect costs of separation from family, community, and job opportunities. Such costs can potentially be mitigated by decentralization of power to lower levels of government (Somin 2016 ch. 5), or even by establishing governance structures that enable foot voting without requiring physical movement (Frey 2001, Frey 2008). But it is difficult to eliminate this problem entirely. In recent years, moving costs in the United States have been exacerbated by zoning restrictions and licensing laws that greatly diminish the mobility of many of the poor and lower-middle class (Schleicher 2017; Glaeser 2017).
A second oft-cited downside is the problem of “races to the bottom.” Instead of competing to enact beneficial policies, subnational governments could compete to enact ones that benefit small groups (usually business interests) at the expense of the general population, thereby enacting harmful environmental policies, among others (e.g. Engel 1997). Competition for taxpayers might result in suboptimal levels of redistribution to the poor, as governments strive to avoid become “welfare magnets” (Peterson 1995). Defenders of decentralization and federalism argue that the race to the bottom theory is flawed, or at least overstated, on both conceptual and empirical grounds (Revesz 1992, Revesz 1997; Oates 2001; Schneiberg and Bartley 2008). The debate over this longstanding question continues.
Another potential problem with footing voting is that it might not work effectively for unpopular racial, ethnic, or religious minority groups. Jurisdictions might be unwilling to compete for or accept people belonging to such groups, and devolution of power to regional and local governments might only exacerbate their oppression at the hands of local majorities. This dynamic led political scientist William Riker (1964, 152-53, 155) to claim that, “[t]he main beneficiary [of federalism] throughout American history has been the Southern Whites, who have been given the freedom to oppress Negroes….. [I]f in the United States one approves of Southern white racists, then one should approve of American federalism.” On the other hand, foot voting sometimes gives minority groups their best opportunity to escape oppressive conditions, as in the case of African-Americans escaping the segregationists southern states in the early twentieth century (Somin 2014).
In federal systems where jurisdictional boundaries follow ethnic or religious divisions so as to diminish intergroup conflict (Brancati 2009), people who do not belong to the dominant ethnic group in a given region might be unwilling or unable to move there, thereby potentially severely limiting foot-voting opportunities. This problem could potentially be mitigated by creating multiple jurisdictions where a given ethnic group is in the majority, thereby giving members of that group a wider range of options.
In recent years, in the United States, there is concern that foot voting might exacerbate the so-called “Big Sort” (Bishop 2008), the apparent tendency of people to cluster in areas where the population has political views similar to their own. To the extent this occurs, it could exacerbate political polarization and hostility. Critics of the “big sort argument question both whether it is actually occurring (Abrams and Fiorina 2009) and whether it would necessarily be harmful if it did (Somin 2016, ch. 5).
Even if foot voting otherwise works as advocates hope, some scholars argue that it is not a genuine mechanism of political choice because many or most actual foot voting decisions are driven by “economic” considerations, such as job opportunities and housing costs (Ellickson 2009; Rhode and Strumpf 2003). But it is not clear whether this truly undermines the “political” element of foot voting. After all, job opportunities and housing costs are significantly impacted by variations in government policy. If decision-making based on such considerations undermines the political value of foot voting, the same is likely to be true of ballot box voting, which is also heavily influenced by economic factors.
Finally, it is important to recognize that foot voting probably cannot be used to address all conceivable political and economic issues. Some may simply be too large-scale to be handled by a regional or local government, and some may even require international cooperation on a global scale to solve (Sandler 2010). Global climate change is perhaps the paradigmatic example.
Despite potential limitations, foot voting can often be a valuable mechanism of social choice. It will surely continue to be an important focus for research and debate.
| BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Samuel. J. Abrams and Morris P. Fiorina, “The ‘Big Sort’ that Wasn’t: A Skeptical Reexamination,” PS: Political Science and Politics (2009): 203-210; Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels, Democracy for Realists: Why Elections Do Not Produce Responsive Government (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Bill Bishop, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing us Apart (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2008); Dawn Brancati, Peace by Design: Managing Intrastate Conflict Through Federalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); James Buchanan and Geoffrey Brennan, The Power to Tax: Analytical Foundations of a Fiscal Constitution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Bryan Caplan, “Rational Ignorance vs. Rational Irrationality,” Kyklos 53 (2001): 3-21; Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Anthony Downs, An Economic Theory of Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1957); Thomas R. Dye, American Federalism: Competition Among Governments (New York: John Wiley, 1990); Robert C. Ellickson, “Legal Sources of Residential Lock-Ins: Why French Households Move Half as Often as U.S. Households,” University of Illinois Law Review (2012): 373–404; Kirsten H. Engel, “State Environmental Standard-Setting: Is there a ‘Race’ and is it ‘to the Bottom,’ Hastings Law Journal 48 (1997): 274-369; Bruno Frey, “A Utopia? Government Without Territorial Monopoly,” Independent Review' 6 (2001): 99-112; Bruno Frey, Happiness: A Revolution in Economics (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008); Edward Glaeser, “Reforming Land Use Regulations,” Brookings Institution (2017), available at https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-land-use-regulations/amp/; Wallace Oates, “Fiscal Competition or Harmonization? Some Reflections,” National Tax Journal vol. LIV, no. 3 (2001): 507-512; Paul E. Peterson, The Price of Federalism (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995); William Riker, Federalism: Origins, Operation, Significance (Boston: Little, Brown, 1964); Richard Revesz, “Rehabilitating Interstate Competition: Rethinking the ‘Race to the Bottom’ Rationale for Federal Environmental Regulation,” NYU Law Review 67 (1992): 1210-54; Richard Revesz, “The Race to the Bottom and Federal Environmental Regulation: A Response To Critics,” Minnesota Law Review 82 (1997); Todd Sandler, Global Collective Action (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); David Schleicher, “Stuck!, The Law and Economics of Residential Stability,” Yale Law Journal 127 (2017): 78-154; Marc Schneiberg and Tim Bartley, “Organizations, Regulation, and Economic Behavior: Regulatory Dynamics and Forms from the Nineteenth to Twenty-First Century,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 4 (2008): 31-61; Ilya Somin, “Foot Voting, Decentralization, and Development,” Minnesota Law Review 102 (2017): 1649-70; Ilya Somin, Democracy and Political Ignorance: Why Smaller Government is Smarter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2nd ed., 2016); Ilya Somin, “Rational Ignorance,” in Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies, ed. by Matthias Gross and Linsey McGoey (London: Routledge, 2015); Ilya Somin, “Foot Voting, Federalism, and Political Freedom,” in Nomos: Federalism and Subsidiarity, ed. by J. Fleming and J. Levy (New York: New York University Press, 2014); Ilya Somin, “Federalism and Property Rights,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (2011): 53-88; Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf, “Assessing the Importance of Tiebout Sorting: Local Heterogeneity from 1885 to 1990,” American Economic Review 93 (2003):1648–77; Robert S. Taylor, Exit Left: Markets and Mobility in Republican Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); Charles Tiebout, “A Pure Theory of Local Expenditures,” Journal of Political Economy 64 (1956): 516-24; Barry Weingast, “The Economic Role of Political Institutions: Market-Preserving Federalism and Economic Development,” Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization 11 (1995):1-31. |
Ilya Somin
Last updated: September 2018