Freakonomics authors Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner question Why Vote? in The New York Times Magazine. Here’s one observation:
Perhaps we vote in the same spirit in which we buy lottery tickets. After all, your chances of winning a lottery and of affecting an election are pretty similar. From a financial perspective, playing the lottery is a bad investment. But it’s fun and relatively cheap: for the price of a ticket, you buy the right to fantasize how you’d spend the winnings – much as you get to fantasize that your vote will have some impact on policy.
It’s a fantasy all right.