The act of voting: Another challenge for behavioural economics

Abstract Behavioural economists propose the ‘aspiration‐based adaptive rule’ (ABAR) model in which a trial‐and‐error heuristic is developed to explain voter turnout. However, several problems appear. First, the model links propensity to vote with expected pay‐offs that are in turn based on the extent to which the pay‐offs of previous actions of voting exceeded the agents' aspirations. But this leads to an infinite regress to previous actions of voting, which has the consequence of leaving unexplained why people bother to vote in the first place. Second, the ABAR model is tautological for even if the model derives testable statistical distributions, the theoretical premises from which these predictions are derived are inevitably confirmed. As a result, the same premises can be used to explain both voting and abstention, and capture theoretically all possibilities.