Linkage

Grimsby is voting UKIP because of Europe, not immigration.

Ted Jeory goes behind the headlines of the Lutfur Rahman case. (Non-UK readers: Lutfur Rahman was Mayor of a London borough and has recently been found guilty of corrupt practices. Ted Jeory was a  journalist who bravely investigated him.)

And lastly…I started my spare time blog in 2010 when I realised my former paper, the East London Advertiser, was no longer able or willing to keep an eye on the detail of the council administration. I kept plugging away where it should have been. For that, I received numerous legal threats from the town hall. None succeeded. But the retreat of so many local papers across the UK is deeply worrying. How many other Lutfur Rahmans are there out there?

Voting

The blogosphere debates the rationality of voting. (As usual I am behind the curve here.) Andrew Gelman:

In swing states (or for close non-presidential elections), though, it’s a different story Aaron, Nate, and I have estimated the probability of your vote being decisive in a swing state as being in the range 1 in a million to 1 in 10 million. Low, but not zero, and Aaron, Noah, and I argue that it can be make sense to vote because of the social benefits that a voter might feel arise from his or her preferred candidate winning.

Phil Arena:

First, being pivotal to the outcome of your state is not the same as being pivotal to the outcome of a presidential election.

Kindred Winecoff:

Even still Arena is giving Gelman's argument more credit than it deserves. In fact, Gelman doesn't have an argument. He simply pretends as if there was a utility function out there such that it would make sense for people to vote at 1/10,000,000 odds (those are only the swing state voters, not the median or modal or otherwise typical voter). So far as I know no such utility function has ever been modeled or tested against peoples' actual subjective utilities, and Arena points out numerous analogous situations in which folks generally behave differently -- getting in a car crash, getting shot while on campus, etc. -- despite similar or better (worse?) odds.

Actually, David Myatt has a paper showing that, in a plausible model of voting, one's probability of pivotality is 1/N, where N is the number of voters, and that for some standard utility-based models of altruism, that should be enough to get you to vote (because you are providing a benefit to N people). Warning: the paper is not as easy to read as a blog post. As I understand it, David is not arguing that this kind of instrumental rationality does explain why people vote; he is arguing that it could explain it, and that therefore two critics of rational choice theory from the 1990s are mistaken.

Source: mociun.tumblr.com via jessica on Pinterest

I remember the 90s!

Relatedly, at ESA Tucson I saw Ulrike Malmendier present a field experiment - not currently available online - on why people vote, arguing that it is related to (1) social pressure and (2) the cost of lying. This seems a more hopeful approach than constructing game-theoretic arguments alone - though, NB, the paper combined data with theory to estimate parameters of a model, rather than just directly estimating vote probabilities.