The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies

Voters are not merely ignorant, Caplan argues, but systematically mistaken in predictable directions, holding anti-market, anti-foreign, make-work and pessimistic biases that survive contact with the evidence. Because a single vote almost never decides anything, there is little personal cost to believing whatever feels good. The book that made irrational voting a mainstream subject in political economy.