What Do We Do When We Vote? A Choice-Based Account of Democratic Participation

This paper develops a conceptual account of voting that interprets it as a form of choosing, rather than as the expression of preferences or judgments. The aim is to clarify what kind of action voting is and to show why this interpretation better fits how citizens actually participate in democratic procedures and what makes voting democratically valuable. The paper begins by examining the two dominant approaches to voting. The preference-based view, rooted in social choice theory, conceives voting as the expression of individuals’ rankings of outcomes, often in self-interested or instrumental terms. The judgment-based view, inspired by Rousseauvian and deliberative traditions, sees voting as the expression of citizens’ judgments about the common good and as part of an epistemic process. Both capture important aspects of democratic participation, but each faces difficulties. Preference-based accounts rely on a narrow, often economic notion of motivation that overlooks the deliberative and interactive aspects of voting. Judgment-based accounts, by contrast, assume demanding standards of impartiality and shared reasoning that are hard to sustain in contexts of persistent moral and political disagreement. In response, the paper defends a choice-based view. To vote is to make a choice within a collective decision-making procedure that offers more than one option and where one’s act contributes—alongside others’—to determining the outcome. Voting, so understood, is an act of endorsement that expresses citizens’ authorship over political outcomes without assuming that individual votes are decisive or epistemically privileged. Drawing on Enoch’s idea of autonomy as sovereignty, the paper argues that voting embodies citizens’ equal standing as agents whose choices matter to collective decisions, even if each individual contribution is small. This framework also clarifies the purposes that electoral practices can serve. Elections can be understood as aiming either to select officeholders or to communicate citizens’ evaluations to the political class. Within this context, the paper distinguishes between internal and external orientations to voting. An internal orientation is one in which the voter votes for the option they want to see winning, whether this reflects an ideal preference or a pragmatic compromise. An external orientation, by contrast, treats the vote primarily as a communicative act—such as protest voting—where a valid choice is made without the intention that the selected option should win. Finally, the paper considers how this account applies to elections and referendums. Elections are typically multidimensional: each option bundles together several, sometimes inconsistent, policy proposals and is also shaped by candidates’ traits and records. They rarely employ majority rule because they involve multiple alternatives. Referendums, by contrast, are usually single-issue and two-option procedures that rely on majority rule. These features may reduce incentives for protest voting, though not eliminate them, as shown by the Brexit case. By describing voting as choosing, the paper offers a more accurate and less idealized account of what citizens do when they vote, highlighting the role of autonomy, equality, and shared responsibility in democratic decision-making.