Debunking the idea of a “bobotante”
Elections that are free, competitive, and institutionalized are considered to be one of the pillars of democracy as authority emanates from the sovereign — the people (O’Donnell, 1999). Elections have also been seen as an institutionalized form of a wager because who you vote for may not be the one who wins the election, but you’ll have to accept it. The outcomes of elections have always been a subject of curiosity in political science. A vast amount of literature, in attempts to explain the outcome of an election, have delved in understanding how people vote and why they vote the way they do. Without a doubt, these questions have been one of the perennial issues that political science and cognate disciplines wants to address.
One approach in this field is rational choice theory — an approach that is borrowed from economics. This theory posits that individuals are rational beings because they have a consistent set of preferences and that they are going to choose something that will give them the most benefits (Chong, 2013). Given that, this theory assumes that individuals have an omniscient and unbounded information. Meaning to say, an individual who makes decisions are assumed to have perfect information in order for him/her to choose an option that will yield the most benefit to him/her (Chong, 2013). Applied to voting behavior studies, it assumes that a voter votes for the candidate that will give the most benefits he or she will receive from them. This theory of voting behavior provides the us a framework through which we analyze the decisions of voters so much so that if individuals vote based on their preferences and utility, then it is probable that we may already predict how someone will vote; and that if someone vote based on their self-interest, then that voter is a rational voter — in every sense of the word. Otherwise, the voter would be considered as irrational.
But is there really an irrational voter or stupid voter? In the context of the Philippines, there is a word that captures that which is bobotante — a portmanteau of bobo (stupid) and botante (voter) — a stupid voter, in a literal sense (Vergara, 2019). These group of voters are often identified as those belonging to the low-class sector of the country or the masses have always been blamed and vilified for the poor outcome of elections — most recently of the 2019 Midterm Elections where no opposition candidates won a seat in the 12 vacant seats in the Senate (Bueno, 2019). They have been called as the uneducated voters of the Philippines and that some believe that the way they vote is highly detrimental to the country. This categorization of a sector of the populace highlights the divide in the country in terms of access to free education and the inequal opportunities between different classes. This, however, only brings to light the predisposition of the so-called “educated voters” to think of people who vote differently from them to be an anomaly or something that is wrong. Or in the context of the current discussion, it’s about the polar opposites of the “educated” rational voter and the bobotante or the irrational voter.
The question now is, are bobotantes really irrational voters? I beg to differ. Bobotantes are as rational as “educated” voters hence the unnecessary categorization. As it has been discussed in the earlier parts of this essay, an individual is rational if he or she chose an option that would yield the most benefit to him or her. This view entails that in order for an individual to choose the most utility-maximizing option he or she must know all the information that will guide him or her to decide. In short, the theory assumes that individuals have perfect information. But this is not the case. Dennis Chong (2013) argues that if a possession of perfect information is a requisite for an individual to be rational, then there will be no rational beings at all as it does not exist considering the limited faculties of man. This concept of bounded rationality has had a great impact on challenging the core assumptions of rational choice. Aside from this, Chong (2013) also argues that gathering all the information will be in itself already an irrational action — as it would be cost-ineffective. The tensions, notwithstanding, Chong (2013) argues that despite the absence of such perfect information, an individual may still be rational in a way that an individual chose his or her actions that will maximize his/her utility within the limited and imperfect information he or she possess; and in the context of elections, it certainly is cost-inefficient to gather all the information considering the noise of the political campaigns. More certainly, voters nonetheless decide on what they can recall and on how they think this candidate will affect them. In either case, voters — whether educated or otherwise — vote based on the same principle and hence, rational voters.
Therefore, who we call bobotantes does not really exist — as every vote is considered to be an informed, well-deliberated, and educated vote just as much as a college degree holder’s vote. Hence, the issue of the bobotante is more on casting the blame to another group of voters different than yours and has nothing to do with the rationality of their choice.
The challenge therefore is to have a good voter education program that does not force a voter to vote for a certain candidate or otherwise. A good voter education program is one that’s designed to simply be a trigger of personal thinking and decision process. The task of voter education is not to preach but to be a medium of discussion where participants would be able to express and process the issues that matter to them and the principles that they hold dear. Perhaps, we should talk about this in a different essay.
The challenges ahead are daunting but not at all impossible to surpass. We cannot overemphasized the importance of this understanding especially since the country is well on its way to the next Presidential Elections in 2022 and as expectations of its potential divisiveness and further polarization of the society are growing.
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Bueno, A. (2019). Who are you calling a “bobotante”? CNN Life.
Chong, D. (2013). Degrees of Rationality in Politics. In L. Huddy;, D. O. Sears;, & J. S. Levy (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Political Psychology (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
O’Donnell, G. (1999). Democratic theory and comparative politics. Dados, 42(4), 577–654. https://doi.org/10.1590/S0011-52581999000400001
Vergara, R. (2019). “Move on,” don’t blame “bobotante” for election results — experts. CNN Philippines.
