Oh man, this is becoming a homework assignment...
1) Voting sends a signal of consent for voting as a system
2 parties here - the sender and the receiver of the signal. People vote for all kinds of reasons. (strategic, oppositional, expressive, protest, hell, I've written in Mickey Mouse before...)
The reason doesn't change the signal. The lever that you pull to vote doesn't really care about your reason.
And who is the receiver of the signal? Politicians? Other voters? Non-voters? Media?
Everyone. Everyone who saw you vote, received a signal. Everyone you tell that you voted, receives a signal. Everyone that saw a voter turnout statistics, received a signal.
Can you measure those signals?
It can be measured about as well as "eating pizza sends a signal that you like pizza", can be measured. You can measure that by pizza sales. And you can measure voting signals by voter turnout.
These signals are going to be ambiguous depending on the individual context. I will concede that for the most part, voters expect that their preferences will be logged and accepted, and the winner will be designated accordingly, but I can also say that many people who vote do not trust the voting system, but they feel like they have no other option to express their preference.
Valid perspectives but when they vote it still sends a signal.
2) Signals of consent shape the perception of a government's legitimacy
Lots of logical fallacies nested here. First, the voting system isn't the governing system.
Last I checked, we presumably live in a democracy as a governing system, and a democracy is pretty much defined by voting.
Second, I've already demonstrated with actual evidence that governments don't need any turnout level to establish legitimacy - the two things are unrelated.
They don't need specific level of turnout levels but they
do need some minimum level of perceived consent. Turnout levels is one way they get that perceived level of consent.
And as I said above, voting gives more signals than
just turnout levels. When people see you vote, when you tell people you vote, each time it sends a signal.
Everyone's.
The legitimacy of the government's power appears wholly unrelated to the legitimacy of the election that decided who gets to wield that power.
The illusion of legitimacy certainly relies on the perceived legitimacy of the elections.
Election boycotts have mixed results in effectiveness but the one thing that they are universally successful in is reducing the perceived legitimacy of the people in power.
3) Perception shapes reality
Whose perception? The media? The politicians? Who shapes those perceptions?
Again... everyone.
Are they always tied to voting results?
Lots of things impact perception. The results of an election can certainly impact perception, though that's not really part of any point I'm trying to make.
4) Logical leaps about hypothetical individuals responding to ambiguous "signals" and are afraid to disobey unjust laws
Yeah, man, I'm sorry. There are nested assumptions all over the place with this.
If you don't like my assumptions then refute my concrete example of how your vote might impact a person's decision to tweet, or not tweet, about a government's legitimacy.
And if the empirical evidence is contradicting your thesis
It's not though. The empirical evidence tells me, that when voter turnout is low, it's sometimes held up as evidence of a government's illegitimacy.
Empirical evidence tells me, that when voter turnout is high, it's sometimes held up as evidence of a government's legitimacy.
The fact that it is
held up as evidence is enough to demonstrate the proof of my thesis: that voter turnout is used as a signal.
